When Staging Became the Backdoor!
Even the most secure production environments can be undermined by lax staging setups - A short tale of our recent penetration testing engagement.
Ayman Abdul Kareem
Security architect/Senior Product Security Engineer with 8 years of experience securing applications and infrastructure across diverse environments. Currently driving initiatives in AI Security, DevSecOps, cloud security, and security architecture—bridging the gap between engineering and risk management to build resilient systems —always up for connecting on modern security practices.
A banking client had production locked down tight: WAFs, MFA, RBAC — the works.
But their staging environment… not so much.
Here’s what happened during our red teaming engagement:
1. Staging had a publicly accessible Swagger doc listing production APIs.
2. Developers assumed production security was enough — staging wasn’t considered a risk.
3. Using information from staging, we tested production endpoints.
4. One API endpoint was vulnerable to IDOR (Insecure Direct Object References).
4. With the right parameters identified from docs, we could access highly sensitive customer data in production.We immediately recommended:
1. AuthZ checks implemented right.
2. Limit public exposure of Swagger/OpenAPI docs.
3. Lock down and restrict public access to Staging environment.#
Final Thoughts
Lesson: Production may be secure, but your staging/test environments can leak the keys to the kingdom. Red teaming is not just about prod — it’s thinking like an attacker end-to-end.
Security vulnerabilities aren’t just engineering issues — they’re strategic business risks. The faster you can identify, prioritize, and fix them, the stronger your security posture becomes.
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