Penetration testing or commonly known as pen testing is another important way of testing your company’s preparedness for a cyber-attack. Lately, preparing for prevention against cyber-attacks has become an essential part of a board room agendas. More companies are looking at IT security as a vital aspect of company policy and spending massively to protect themselves. Ransomware have been causing havoc in the past 2 years with more sophisticated techniques of attack. Once a system is breached the company not only loses crucial data but reputation (brand image), precious time recovering from damages and loss on ongoing business.
What is Penetration Testing?
An authorized simulated attack on computer looking for systems or networks security vulnerabilities, which might be a cause of leaking information/data to cyber attackers. Often it is confused with vulnerability scan, compliance audit or security assessment however, a penetration tests includes much more processes. The main aim of this process to protect important data from hackers who can have unauthorized access to system. There are various causes of vulnerabilities in the systems, mainly:
- Design and development errors
- Human errors
- Poor system configuration: Physical system security control flaw
A penetration test:
- Does not stop at finding the vulnerabilities of the system. It goes further to exploit the vulnerabilities and show that the system can be breached.
- It effectively answers the question about effective actions taken by IT security team under a real-life breach by simulating the attack
- Answering the real-world effectiveness of security measure is another aspect of tests. Hackers are increasingly evolving methods and hence the cyber security should be upped with the same speed.
- It allows tester to understand systems behavior under multiple attacks on the system.
- Help fix all the identified security flaws.
An approach for Penetration test:
Why your organization needs it?
Here are few reasons why organizations invest in pen testing:
- Determining the feasibility of particular set of attack.
- Identifying system vulnerabilities after a system has been attack by one vector.
- Dedicated testing to identify vulnerabilities which may not have been detected by automated security parsers.
- Assessing the magnitude of potential business and operational impact in case of a real attack.
- Compliance testing.
- Testing the strength of the security measures in network, to be able to detect an attack and act accordingly.
Understanding what is the scope of test is very important in this case. What is important for organization and making a very unique case for each company will give better results. Logix Infosecurity has a team of consummate testers which will help your company plan and test the IT systems capabilities to fight with a full-scale attack. Logix also has market leading cyber security tools and DLP tools which can keep your organization safe.