While one of your main goals as a business is to enhance the security of your applications and network systems, you might unknowingly dabble into it and leave most of your data vulnerable to an attack. Leaving unidentified security loopholes that can be penetrated by cybercriminals can cause harm to your company. What might surprise you is that only 38% of organizations can claim that they are ready to battle against any sophisticated cybersecurity threats.
Sometimes, to best identify the threat level your business faces, paying for ethical hacking or penetration testing can unearth valuable information. This will involve working alongside white-hat or ethical hackers and third-party IT officers to simulate a real-time cyber-attack against your systems.
Here is why investing in this strategy matters:
Reveal The Imminent Threats
Knowing your threat scope is the first step to identifying the best strategies to counter cyber threats. In most cases, your company will be prone to data loss if potential threats are not attended to early. Some of these vulnerability areas include poor network connectivity, issues with web application firewalls and even problems with your logging practices.
For instance, your log data, when recorded in the right way, can showcase the unhealthy parts of your security system to help curb any future issues, according to the PHP logging basics guide by Loggly.com. Multiple tests have to be conducted to identify both the high-risk and medium-risk vulnerabilities. In case you have minimal to no high-risk vulnerability points, the ethical hackers can switch to concentrating on the medium-risk ones.
Identify the Real Risk of Vulnerabilities
It is one thing to identify the threat and another to simulate the threats in action. Once IT managers and the threat department experience an attack in a simulated environment, they can know what to expect from the attackers. Theoretically, you might classify a specific vulnerability as a high-risk one whereas the complexity of achieving it makes it a low-risk one.
Similarly, low-risk vulnerability might cause more harm depending on the context of the attack. When done by specialized people, this analysis helps to ensure that there are little to no false positives in the report. As a result, the security team can spend more time concentrating on the most likely threats.
Test Your Cyber Defense Capabilities
The main reason for a penetration test is to identify whether you are ready enough to counter the threats. As the penetration testers try to gain control over your system through multiple attacks, your IT security team should identify the attack points and counter them in good time. For instance, once the attackers are identified, your team should find it easy to block them while eliminating their tools from your systems.
This should also be the period for gauging the efficiency of security tools such as your IDS and WAF, according to CSO Online. An attack should be automatically detected by these tools, and the concerned members of staff should be alerted to respond accordingly.
Comply With Regulations
Regulatory requirements are meant to safeguard your interests and the interests of those you conduct business with. While you might have done your best to comply with security regulations, there is no telling what loopholes you might have in your system. A penetration test can help identify these vulnerability points to place you on the right side of the law.
In fact, some regulations require you to perform penetration tests against your information systems. Although ticking a checklist shouldn’t be your number one motivation for performing the tests, it surely helps to have your security practices at par with the set regulations.
Conclusion
In spite of penetration testing being an information mine, it is of no value if your company fails to take action after the tests are done. Other than reacting to the identified vulnerabilities, you should conduct the tests regularly. In case a threat isn’t identified in the first test, it can be identified in the next one.
