Security Checklist for Hiring Developers in Pakistan

Security in an offshore engagement is mostly about access design, and access design is entirely within your control. This checklist is usable by a buyer without a dedicated security team.

Identity and access

• Individual accounts in your own identity provider for every person, never shared credentials.
• Multi-factor authentication required, without exception.
• Least-privilege scopes decided per person rather than copied from a colleague.
• Repository and cloud permissions reviewed periodically.
• Access logged, with logs retained long enough to be useful.
• Time-bound access for anything granted for a specific task.

This is the highest-leverage area. It determines what any individual can reach, makes access auditable, and turns offboarding into a revocation rather than a conversation.

Devices

Control	Standard expectation
Disk encryption	Required on any device touching your systems
Screen lock	Short timeout, enforced
Operating system	Current and patched
Endpoint protection	Present and reporting
Local data	No copies of sensitive data on the device

For higher-sensitivity work, some buyers require managed devices or access through a virtual environment they control. Decide your standard and write it into the contract rather than assuming it.

Secrets

Secrets belong in a managed store with rotation, referenced at runtime rather than committed to configuration files, pasted into messages, or stored in personal password managers.

Scan repositories continuously for committed secrets, because accidental commits happen everywhere, and rotate anything that appears in history rather than deleting the commit. The DevOps post covers the pipeline practices.

Data handling

Use de-identified or synthetic data for development and testing wherever possible. Where production data is genuinely required, scope access narrowly, justify it in writing, log it, and time-bound it.

Classify your data, define handling rules per class, and put them in the contract along with retention, sub-processor disclosure, and incident notification timelines. Your compliance team sets the requirements; this is general guidance rather than legal advice.

Code and dependencies

Code in your repository from the first commit. Branch protection requiring review. Dependency and container scanning in the build pipeline. A dependency inventory delivered with the work. Licence compliance checked automatically.

These are standard at competent firms and worth confirming rather than assuming, because the cost of discovering a licence problem after launch is disproportionate.

Offboarding

Create the checklist when someone is onboarded, not when they leave. Accounts disabled across every system including third-party services, shared credentials rotated, devices confirmed clear of your data, repository forks accounted for, and written confirmation.

Execute it the same day. Access sprawl from incomplete offboarding is the most common real exposure in offshore arrangements, and it is entirely preventable.

What to ask the vendor before contracting

Their security practices summary covering all of the above, their incident notification process and timelines, whether they have answered buyer security questionnaires before, and whether subcontractors are used and bound by equivalent terms.

Firms with enterprise clients have these documents ready and send them within a day. Firms that improvise them under deadline are telling you about their client base.

What about AI-specific considerations?

Newer and worth addressing explicitly. What data reaches a model provider and under which terms, whether inputs are used for training, where inference runs, what is logged and retained, and whether retrieval respects the same permission boundaries as the rest of your system.

Configure provider settings deliberately rather than accepting defaults. The AI development page covers the practices.

How do you verify rather than trust?

Ask for evidence of a recent offboarding, a redacted access review, and the dependency inventory from a past project. Run your own access review a month into the engagement and see whether what you find matches what you expect.

Verification once, early, changes the whole tone of an engagement in a useful direction.

How much security is proportionate?

Match it to the data and the blast radius rather than to anxiety. A marketing site with no personal data needs individual accounts, secrets management, and dependency scanning; a system holding health or financial records needs everything above plus stricter device controls, narrower data access, and audit obligations.

The failure in both directions is real. Under-controlling a sensitive system creates exposure nobody notices until it matters; over-controlling a trivial one wastes effort and, worse, trains everyone to treat security process as theatre. Classify the engagement early, apply the controls the classification calls for, and write the rationale down so the next person understands why the rules are what they are.

What should you do in the first month?

Run one access review. List every account with access to your systems, confirm each person still needs the scope they have, remove anything granted for a task that has finished, and check that the offboarding checklist would actually work.

Doing this once, early, achieves three things: it finds the access sprawl that has already accumulated, it signals to the vendor that access is monitored, and it establishes a habit that costs half an hour a quarter thereafter. Buyers who never run one usually discover at the end of an engagement that a dozen accounts have been active for a year longer than anyone intended.

What does FISTA Solutions provide?

Access through your identity provider with least privilege, development against de-identified data where required, secrets in a manager, dependency scanning in the pipeline, documented offboarding, a security practices summary in a due-diligence pack under NDA, and code in your repository from the first commit.

Related reading: is Pakistan safe for software outsourcing and NDA and IP protection when hiring in Pakistan, plus staff augmentation.

Design the access, not the trust

Five areas, most of them configured once. Get them right and the security conversation becomes a formality rather than a concern.

Message FISTA Solutions on WhatsApp or start a project and ask for the practices summary.