Penetration testing
Penetration testing can exploit the vulnerabilities while a vulnerability scan identifies the rank of vulnerability and report it. Penetration testing is a protective and unauthorized effect of hacking into the computer system to find the vulnerabilities from various viewpoints. The white hat hackers perform penetration testing. Penetration testing is of two types, External and Internal. An External penetration test is used to test the effectiveness of a security system to detect and prevent the attacks. It also finds the weaknesses in internal-facing assets like website, email, and file shares. Internal penetration tests always assume that you have internal network access. If you are worried that an employee of your organization could access the unauthorized data, an internal pen test can provide valuable insight. Suppose an employee of your organization opens an attachment with a phishing email or your site’s visitor access the information that he is not authorized to view by plugging their device into your local network. In that case, this test will provide you the amount of damage an intruder does.
Need for Penetration Testing
- The goal of amateur or professional hacker is to steal the sensitive data of your organization. They may be wanted to destroy your company, or they may be after the money. Your company’s reputation can be negatively affected by one single incident of system downtime. Your customer or business partner will think twice about their relationship security with your organization.
- To secure your system, regular updating your password and window firewall is not enough. Highly skilled hackers can easily access your computer system. They can get any information which they want without even knowing you.
- Any organization, corporation or company that depends on IT should have to regularly test the security of their system. To prevent your company from illegal hacking or the negative effect of system downtime, you also have to update your security features.
Benefits of Penetration testing
There are various benefits of penetration testing, which are as follows:
Reveal Vulnerabilities
The main purpose of penetration testing is to find out the weaknesses of your computer system and network infrastructure. While penetration testing, the actions and habits of employees of your organization will also be researched so that it could lead us to data breaches and malicious infiltration. Penetration tester provides you a report about the security vulnerabilities. After that, you know about the software and hardware that need to improve or about the policies and recommendations that need to improve for the overall security of your organization.
Show Real risks
Penetration testers will try to exploit identified vulnerabilities. That means you can see the action of the attacker in the real world. The attacker might execute the command of your operating system and access the sensitive data of your system. An attacker might face the difficulty of exploitation, so penetration testing will also tell you that vulnerability is not as much risky as telling theoretically. A specialist can only perform that type of analysis.
Test Cyber-Defence Capability
While penetration testing, you should find the attacks and respond adequately on time. When an intrusion is detected, you should begin investigations the intruders, discover and block them. We will block them, whether the intruders are malicious or not. Experts test the effectiveness of your protection strategy.
Ensure Business Continuity
You have to ensure that your company operations are up and running all the time. For this, you want the availability of the network, 24/7 communication, and resource access. Any disruption in your company will make a negative impact on customers or business partners. When we do penetration testing, it will reveal your potential threats. It will also ensure that there is no unexpected downtime or accessibility loss in your operations.
Third-Party opinion
If someone identifies an issue in your organization, your management may not be inclined to act or react. The management faces a bigger impact by the report, which is made by a third party expect. This report may lead to the allocation of additional funds.
Follow certification
A certain level of penetration testing is required in your industry and legal compliance. According to the PCI regulation and ISO 27001 standards, the regular security review and penetration testing are conducted by the manager and system owner with skilled testers. That’s why the pen test focuses on the consequences of real-life.
Maintain Trust
A system breakdown or cyber-attack negatively affects the loyalty of your business partners and customers. You can reassure all your partners if your company is famous for its penetration testing, systematic and strict security.