Clients often ask what actually happens after the scoping call. The answer is deliberately boring: a disciplined pipeline where quiet observation comes first, loud exploitation second, and clear writing last. Here's how a Sablewatch assessment moves from recon to report without surprises.
Recon: learn everything, touch nothing
The first days are silent. Certificate transparency logs, DNS history, code repositories, forgotten staging hosts — I build the target's public footprint the way a real adversary would, and half of my critical findings start life as a strange hostname on this list.
Exploitation: validate, don't theorize
A scanner says "possibly vulnerable." I say "here's the session cookie." Every finding in my reports was reproduced by hand, with screenshots and request logs, so your developers never waste a sprint chasing a false positive.
Pivoting: follow the blast radius
One foothold is never the end. We chain access toward the agreed crown jewels — quietly, within the rules of engagement — because the distance from "low-severity bug" to "full compromise" is the number executives actually need.
Reporting: write for two audiences
Executives get risk in plain language with a one-page remediation order. Engineers get reproduction steps, affected components, and fix guidance with code hints. Then we get on a call, walk through it live, and retest every critical for free.
