Penetration Testing

Penetration Testing

Hacker: simply a person who invades or interferes with another system with the intent to cause harm, without having any permission from the system owner.

Ethical hacker: a professional hired by an organization to review its security posture from the eyes of the hacker. Ethical hackers test vulnerabilities of the systems.

Penetration tester: a professional who goes a step beyond the ethical hacker and provides an active analysis of the system for any potential vulnerabilities that could result from poor or improper system configuration, either known and unknown hardware or software flaws, or operational weaknesses. These professionals are largely involved in remediation. The whole process involves a written consent and rules of engagement from the client, which clearly spell what they can or cannot do, "This is basically our 'get out of jail free' card," Bavisi says.

Penetration testing, often called “pentesting”,“pen testing”, or “security testing”, is the practice of attacking your own or your clients’ IT systems in the same way a hacker would to identify security holes. Of course, you do this without actually harming the network. The person carrying out a penetration test is called a penetration tester or pentester.

WHY PERFORM PENETRATION TESTING?

Security breaches and service interruptions are costly

Security breaches and any related interruptions in the performance of services or applications, can result in direct financial losses, threaten organizations’ reputations,  erode customer loyalties, attract negative press, and trigger significant fines and penalties.

It is impossible to safeguard all information, all the time

Organizations have traditionally sought to prevent breaches by installing and maintaining  layers of defensive security mechanisms, including user access controls, cryptography, IPS, IDS and firewalls. However, the continued adoption of new technologies, including some of these security systems, and the resulting complexity introduced, has made it even harder to find and eliminate all of an organizations’ vulnerabilities and protect against many types of potential security incidents. New vulnerabilities are discovered each day, and attacks constantly evolve in terms of their technical and social sophistication, as well as in their overall automation.  

Penetration testing identifies and prioritizes security risks

Penetration testing evaluates an organization’s ability to protect its networks, applications, endpoints and users from external or internal attempts to circumvent its security controls to gain unauthorized or privileged access to protected assets. Test results validate the risk posed by specific security vulnerabilities or flawed processes, enabling  IT management and security professionals to prioritize remediation efforts. By embracing more frequent and comprehensive penetration testing, organizations can more effectively  anticipate emerging security risks and prevent unauthorized access to critical systems and valuable information.

Benefits of Penetration Testing :

Intelligently manage vulnerabilities

Penetration testing provides detailed information on actual, exploitable security threats. By performing a penetration test, you can proactively identify which vulnerabilities are most critical, which are less significant, and which are false positives. This allows your organization to more intelligently prioritize remediation, apply needed security patches and allocate security resources more efficiently to ensure that they are available when and where they are needed most.

Avoid the cost of network downtime

Recovering from a security breach can cost an organization millions of dollars  related to IT remediation efforts, customer protection and retention programs, legal activities, discouraged business partners, lowered employee productivity and  reduced revenue. Penetration testing  helps you to  avoid these financial pitfalls  by proactively identifying and addressing risks before attacks or security breaches occur.

Meet regulatory requirements and avoid fines

Penetration testing helps organizations address  the general auditing/compliance aspects of regulations such as GLBA,  HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley, and specifically addresses testing requirements documented in the PCI-DSS and federal FISMA/NIST mandates. The detailed reports  that penetration tests generate  can help organizations avoid significant fines for non-compliance and allow them to illustrate ongoing due diligence in to assessors by maintaining required security controls to auditors.

Preserve corporate image and customer loyalty  

Even a single incident of compromised customer data can be costly in terms of both negatively affecting sales and tarnishing an organization’s public image. With customer retention costs higher than ever, no one wants to lose the loyal users that they’ve worked hard to earn, and data breaches are likely to turn off new clients. Penetration testing helps you avoid data incidents that put your organization’s reputation and trustworthiness at stake.