By the MTP International Quality Engineering Team · June 2026

Most compromised systems didn’t fail because their team was unaware of existing attacks. They failed because no one systematically verified if the system was vulnerable to them before an attacker did. The difference between an organization that detects its own vulnerabilities and one that discovers them through an incident is not about budget or technology: it’s about process.

Mexico recorded over 119 million blocked attack attempts, positioning it as the second most attacked country in Latin America. In 2024, an estimated 6 million cyber frauds occurred in the country, with 7 out of 10 happening on digital channels. These numbers describe the environment in which banking, retail, and manufacturing systems operate in Mexico. The question isn’t if attacks occur: it’s whether your system is prepared to withstand them. The CIU

Why do systems seem secure but aren’t?

The most frequent security problem we find in MTP diagnostics is not the absence of controls: it’s that controls exist but were never verified under real attack conditions. A system can have a firewall, authentication, and data encryption, yet still be vulnerable to an SQL injection in a form that no security engineer reviewed because “that field isn’t critical.”

Broken access control is the most common vulnerability in web applications, found in 94% of tested applications according to the OWASP Top 10 2025. It’s not an exotic flaw or a sophisticated attack: it’s a configuration error where a user can access resources or functions they shouldn’t see. KENSAI

The OWASP Top 10—the most cited industry framework for identifying critical risks in web applications—describes in its 2025 edition the ten vulnerability categories that explain most security incidents in production. Four of these are the ones we most frequently find active in systems of Mexican organizations that have never performed a formal security validation.

The Four Most Common Attack Vectors and How They Manifest

SQL and Command Injections

Injection attacks—SQL, NoSQL, operating system commands, LDAP—remain in the OWASP top 3 after two decades. An SQL injection occurs when an attacker introduces malicious code into an input field—a search form, a URL parameter, a login field—and the system executes it as if it were a legitimate database instruction. KENSAI

The result can be reading the entire database, modifying records, deleting data, or taking control of the server. The most direct red flag: any input field that does not validate the type, format, and length of the data it receives, and any database query that constructs its parameters by concatenating user text directly into the query.

Phishing and the Human Factor

Phishing accounts for around 70% of cyberattacks in Mexico according to 2024 reports. Users click on a malicious link within an average of 21 seconds after opening a phishing email, and provide the requested credentials within an additional 28 seconds. This means an organization has less than one minute from when a malicious email is opened until credentials are compromised. DiputadosThe Network Installers

Phishing is not an attack on the system: it’s an attack on the people who have access to the system. The real exposure is not measured in the application’s code but in three factors: how easy it is to impersonate the organization, what level of access compromisable users have, and what additional controls—MFA, anomalous session monitoring, access alerts from unusual locations—exist between the click and the damage.

Broken Access Control

It is the number one category in OWASP 2025 because it is transversal: it affects almost any application that manages user profiles with different privilege levels. The most common failure modes include direct access to resources via URL without authorization verification, privilege escalation where a regular user can execute administrator functions, and exposure of predictable IDs in APIs that allow a user to access other users’ records.

The practical red flag: if an authenticated user can modify a URL or request parameter and access another user’s data, access control is broken.

Vulnerabilities in APIs

94% of organizations reported cybersecurity problems related to their APIs during 2023 (Salt Security). APIs are now the most exposed attack surface in modern applications: they connect the frontend with the backend, integrate third-party services, and expose business logic that was encapsulated on the server in previous versions. An API without robust authentication, input validation, and rate limits is an open attack vector. DeltaProtect

Five Signs Your System Might Be Exposed

Without needing to run a formal test, these conditions indicate probable exposure that requires validation:

Application forms do not validate the type or format of the data they receive. Application URLs include predictable and sequential resource IDs. The application does not have two-factor authentication for profiles with access to sensitive data. Third-party dependencies and stack libraries are not updated with a defined process. Access logs are not monitored or generate alerts for anomalous patterns.

Any of these five conditions, in an organization that processes financial, personal, or regulated data, represents an active risk that an attacker can exploit without sophisticated tools.

How to Systematically Validate Exposure?

Application security validation is not an annual event: it is a continuous capability that operates in three complementary layers.

Static analysis (SAST) evaluates source code before it executes, identifying patterns that correspond to known vulnerabilities—SQL queries built with concatenation, insecure credential handling, dependencies with published CVEs—without needing to deploy the application.

Dynamic analysis (DAST) evaluates the running application, simulating the behavior of an external attacker. It identifies vulnerabilities that only appear at runtime: incorrect security header configurations, exposure of unauthenticated endpoints, behavior with malicious inputs.

Pentesting simulates a real attack executed by a specialist who attempts to exploit vulnerabilities identified in the previous two layers. It confirms if they are exploitable in the system’s real context and quantifies the potential impact of an incident.

At MTP, we integrate all three layers into the CI/CD pipeline with Omniatest®, our proprietary QE methodology, featuring quality gates that block progress to production when high-criticality findings are detected. MTP is the first TMMi Level 5 certified company in the world, which supports the traceability and reproducibility of the security process in each delivery cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the OWASP Top 10 and how do I use it to evaluate my system? The OWASP Top 10 is a reference document published by the Open Web Application Security Project Foundation that lists the ten most critical vulnerability categories in web applications, based on real incident data and industry analysis. Its 2025 edition covers broken access control, cryptographic failures, injections, insecure design, security misconfiguration, vulnerable components, authentication failures, software and data integrity, insufficient logging, and server-side request forgery. Using it as a checklist in an architecture review or as a basis for designing pentest scenarios is the most practical starting point for organizations without a formal security program.
2. Is phishing a software security problem or a people problem? It’s both, and that’s precisely why it requires a two-layered response. The entry vector is human—a click on a malicious link—but the actual damage is determined by the system’s design: what access the compromised user has, whether MFA exists to block the use of stolen credentials, whether monitoring detects anomalous access, and how much time passes between compromise and detection. Reducing the impact of phishing requires both team training and technical controls in the application.
3. How often should I perform security tests? The operational minimum for organizations that continuously release software is to integrate SAST and DAST as automatic steps in the CI/CD pipeline, executing in each integration cycle. Manual pentesting should be performed at least once a year as a validation of the complete security posture, and always before significant architectural changes: cloud migration, incorporation of new APIs, change of authentication provider.

Do you know if your system has active vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit today?

MTP’s Quick Security Assessment identifies the most critical exposure vectors in five business days, at no cost, with recommendations prioritized by business impact.