A Security Requirement Regular Penetration Testing - Aurora IT (1)

1
A Security Requirement Regular Penetration
Testing
2
If you are not already conducting penetration
testing regularly, you may be putting your
organization at risk of a cybersecurity
attack. Heres Why In the past year, the
cybersecurity industry has seen an increase in
cybersecurity attacks on organizations in all
industries and of all sizes. We learned that no
organization can be protected from being a victim
of a cyberattackwhether they are currently
taking steps to protect their environment. For
this reason, stepping up your cybersecurity
portfolio and better securing your environment
is mission-critical. Penetration testing is a
key way to identify the vulnerabilities in your
environment that could be the target of a
security breach. Conducting these services
regularly is a great step towards preventing
costly, high-profile, and time-consuming
cybersecurity attacks from affecting your
environment. Being Proactive Experts have seen
that businesses that conduct pen tests on a
bi-yearly basis are more likely to be able to
take a proactive approach to their
cybersecurity. These businesses can spend their
cybersecurity budgets and resources towards
preventing attacks from happening instead of
using these resources to stop or clean up an
attack that has already occurred. By being
proactive, it saves your organization the hefty
costs of restoring lost data or the cost of
losing data entirely. Being proactive in your
security practices helps organizations to build
trust with their customers and partners. If your
organization is a victim of a high-profile
cybersecurity attack, a business could lose
customers, investors, and partners out of fear
that their data will not be protected if it is
shared with your business. Although there is no
way to be 100 protected from an attack,
conducting penetration tests regularly is an
essential step towards being proactive in
protecting your company and customer data.
3
The Basics The goal of penetration testing is to
reduce an organizations attack surface. The
larger the attack surface, the more opportunities
for an organization to fall victim to a
cyberattack. Security experts will reduce the
attack surface by conducting both manual and
automated tests that simulate real-world
attacks. They will find vulnerabilities that are
the most likely to be exploited by a hacker and
begin the processes of remediating these
vulnerabilities. Remediation and patching are
steps towards reducing the attack surface. With
a smaller attack surface, an organization is
better protected against potential threats. For
businesses in regulated industries, penetration
testing is critical to meet industry standards
of security. To continue conducting business,
these industry standards must be met. These
industries are so regulated because they work
with sensitive customer data. Being in
noncompliance with industry standards such as
HIPAA, NIST 800-171, and PCI DSS can result in
fines. A breach of confidential customer data can
put an organizations reputation at risk.
Conducting penetration testing is an essential
way to achieve compliance with industry standards
and work to protect your customer and company
data. The Steps First, the tester will conduct
automated security scanning to look for any
vulnerabilities. The results of these scans will
be analyzed, and false positives will be
removed. The tester will compile a report of
their findings during this initial scan. They
will also review the design of the network
security within the systems and identify any
weaknesses. They will then perform the scanning
manually to validate what was found in the
initial automatic scan.
4
During a pen test, the security policies that
your company is currently following will be
reviewed. The security consultant that you are
working with may provide feedback as to how
these policies can be improved to better protect
your organizations environment. They will help
implement policies and solutions that will fill
in the gaps in your current security
portfolio. Following the initial set of patches
that were put in place during the initial
scanning, the tester will conduct a rescan to
address any vulnerabilities that were not
addressed during the first scan. Implementing the
steps of penetration testing yearly is highly
recommended for security-conscious organizations.