Case Study: The district achieves full administrative takeover remediation with Asteros penetration testing

The District gains full admin access in minutes with Asteros

During a routine external penetration test for a large regional school district (referred to as the district), Asteros examined the internet-facing systems including a third-party emergency management platform called CampusAlert. The district's challenge was to identify any exploitable weaknesses across its digital perimeter, with a particular concern around whether this critical safety application could be compromised.

Asteros discovered a fundamental design flaw where the application publicly broadcast sensitive data like session tokens and unsalted MD5 password hashes via WebSockets. The solution implemented involved reconfiguring the application to stop this broadcast and enforce proper authentication. As a result, Asteros demonstrated three immediate paths to full administrative compromise were eliminated, securing a system vital to student and staff physical safety.

The District