Web App Pen Test: What I Check in the First 10 Minutes of Every Engagement

TLDR: Most people imagine pen testing as a montage of terminals, complex exploits, and hours of deep technical work. The reality is that the first 10 minutes are almost always the most revealing. I run the same opening checklist on every web application I assess — and in those 10 minutes, I almost always find 2 or 3 things that a real attacker would exploit before they even get to the sophisticated stuff. Here's exactly what that checklist looks like, and how you can run it on your own application today. Why the First 10 Minutes Tell You So Much There's a principle in security that's uncomfortable but consistently true: the most dangerous vulnerabilities in your application are usually the obvious ones. Not because your team is careless — but because obvious things are easy to miss when you're deep in feature development, operating under deadline pressure, and focused on what your application does rather than what it shouldn't allow. An attacker approaching your application cold has no