Many businesses face a variety of security risks. For instance, data breaches can harm a company’s reputation, lead to customer loss and discourage investors from investing in the business.
Penetration testing services can help mitigate these risks by identifying and repairing vulnerabilities. The process involves scanning, enumeration, vulnerability discovery and exploit, privilege escalation and more.
Testing Security
The penetration testing process includes several steps that involve identifying vulnerabilities, exploiting those vulnerabilities, and monitoring the results. The results provide valuable insights into potential risk and offer mitigation techniques. Pen tests are typically performed by a skilled team of security professionals who mimic the strategies and actions of cyber attackers to evaluate the hackability of an organization’s computer systems, networks or web applications.
The first step is reconnaissance, which involves scanning the target network for vulnerable systems and assessing their security posture.
Identifying Vulnerabilities
A penetration test is a method of scrutinizing an IT system, network or web application to spot vulnerabilities that a hacker could exploit. It is a highly technical process that requires extensive knowledge of coding and the use of tools to identify security holes. Penetration testing companies and their analysts (also known as ethical hackers) perform internal and external penetration tests for businesses to identify vulnerabilities in their systems.
The first step in the penetration testing process is reconnaissance, which involves gathering information about a target system. This includes identifying IP addresses, domain details and network services.
Identifying Risks
Pentesting can be used to identify and quantify the risk of a cyber attack. It can be performed on internal and external systems, cloud environments, web applications and wireless networks. It is a live, manual process that can take from a day to a few weeks and is generally more accurate than vulnerability assessments.
The penetration testing process consists of several phases: reconnaissance, discovery, exploitation, and report. It identifies vulnerabilities by emulating the behaviour of real threat actors and then provides a prioritized remediation plan to close these gaps.
Method of Mitigating Risk
During the vulnerability assessment phase, penetration testers search for exploitable vulnerabilities in networks and web applications. These are often hidden or hard to detect, and may include things like unused ports, configuration weaknesses, and SQL injections. This information can then be used to patch or improve an organization’s IT infrastructure and secure data.
In addition to assessing the technical security posture of an organization, penetration testing also involves nontechnical methods such as social engineering. This includes posing as an employee or customer to gain access to systems.