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What you should look for in your Next Pen Testing Project?

Ruchika Tyagi

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Cyber attacks can be very severe for an organization and can result not just in monetary loss but reputation loss as well. All organizations are susceptible to these attacks – Cyber attackers don’t look at the size of the business before attacking it. Businesses of all sizes have to take precautions and that’s where Penetration testing plays a key role.

Penetration testing is a process where experienced “White Hat Hackers” attempt to penetrate a company’s cyber defences, using the same tools which hackers use it to search for vulnerabilities and mount an attack on the company. This attack can be against users, customers. Data exfiltration as well as technical insider threats based on internal threats – from users, customers, vendors etc, as well as, external threats to – applications, network, Wi-Fi, website. All this is done in a controlled manner, so as not to cause any disruption to the organization.

Thus, Penetration testing is a part of cyber security that helps in checking if the security controls to be fully compliant with various standards and organizational needs. It is a combination of human expertise & professional penetration testing tool.

Some of the benefits of Penetration testing –

1) Helps find out the vulnerabilities in the system: Pentesters can exploit hundreds of vulnerabilities, that are open to attack – e.g. SQL injection.

2) Small vulnerabilities cannot be ignored – they can open the door for high risk issues. Often these are overlooked by the organisation or even by the automated tools. But when a professional pen- tester collects all the information & looks from the overall perspective, then they can analyse the severity of the risks and advise the organization accordingly.

3) Reporting: It gives the clear insights of vulnerabilities on the basis of the severity of the risks to improve the security posture of the organization.

Things to take care of before embarking on a Pen Testing project:

1) If not done properly, it can result in exposing sensitive data, crashing the servers, and can even open doors for the hackers. Therefore, you should work with established and certified companies for Pen Testing.

2) You have to trust the company you hire for the Pen Testing – you are actually giving the exposure of your organization’ weaknesses to someone, when they try to hack into your system – so it is very critical they should not misuse that trust.

3) If possible, the Pen-Test should be conducted in the production environment and without notice. If any advance notice is given, then the surprise element is lost; since people will prepare for the test. The test could lead to misleading results. But in case of very critical setups, the pen testing can be done in an identical UAT environment, so that it does not cause any issues.

If you need expert advice then please contact us for Vulnerability Assessments and Penetration Tests. We offer both onsite & remote testing, in whichever way is most appropriate for your organization.

The only way to protect what you’ve worked hard to build is to be vigilant when it comes to cybersecurity. If you’d like to know more about how your business can benefit from managed services, just give us a call, we are here to help.