What Are Penetration Tests? Types Of Penetration Tests

Therefore, the applications hosted by your organization must not be vulnerable, or information can easily be compromised. Deploying a penetration testing team during the SDLC phase helps avoid the costs that can otherwise result from data breaches. With so many moving parts, automated testing tools save time and often provide better penetration testing results than manual efforts. Costly security breaches, data loss, compromised systems, users and applications: all pose a high risk to the business. Penetration testing, especially automated penetration testing, can be a very effective tool to prevent real attacks and mitigate such vulnerabilities.

This type of penetration testing evaluates the development, design and coding of your website or web application to find areas that expose sensitive customer information or company data. Through ongoing cyber monitoring and regular cybersecurity training for employees, conducting internal network penetration testing can help your organization prepare for this very real possibility. Penetration testing involves frequent internal security audits conducted by a team of trained employees or IT professionals.

Care must be taken when conducting physical security checks: Security personnel must know how to verify the validity of the auditor’s actions, such as through a point of contact or documentation. Another non-technical attack method is the use of social engineering, such as posing as a help desk employee and calling to request a user’s passwords, or posing as a user and calling the help desk to reset a password. Both manual and automated tests simulate attacks on web applications to identify security holes, vulnerabilities and other ways malicious hackers can illegally gain access to sensitive data. Many organizations have policies that mandate regular penetration testing, or are required to do so to comply with industry standards and regulations. One of the benefits of penetration testing is that it can help ensure that an organization is meeting security obligations such as those required by PCI, HIPAA, FISMA and ISO 27001.

Vulnerable areas of the system or application are identified through an authorized simulated attack on the system. The main purpose of this type of system testing is to detect outsiders, such as hackers, gaining unauthorized access to a system. In external network penetration testing, pentesters hack into your systems without first gaining access to your network. In other words, pentesters using risk management this testing method access the vulnerability areas of your network from the periphery of the systems. Penetration testing can vary depending on the pentester’s perspective and the scope of the test. Finding out which type of penetration testing is best for your specific IT infrastructure and security concerns can help you eliminate certain risks and reduce the downsides of penetration testing.

Penetration testing and vulnerability scanning are important aspects of network security, but they have different goals. Penetration testing is used to test a network’s defenses against a real-world attack. At the same time, a vulnerability assessment is a non-intrusive scan that looks for potential vulnerabilities in a network. A company that has no sensitive data on its network might test once a month, while an e-commerce site with a high risk group for information theft might need weekly or daily testing.

TestingXperts has a wealth of experience in security testing and serves a wide variety of business needs. TestingXperts has been serving clients from various industries for over a decade. Our web application penetration testing services uncover application vulnerabilities and minimize application risks.