In a recent webinar, Difenda’s cybersecurity experts discussed how you can overcome pen testing challenges and understand what exploitation techniques are possible in today’s cybersecurity landscape. They covered why offensive security is important, the steps your organization needs to take to protect its infrastructure and our attack-driven approach to penetration testing.
Below are some key takeaways from the event.
What is Pen Testing?
Pen testing aims to identify security weaknesses in networks, systems, and applications to improve your network’s security hygiene. Your penetration testing experts will actively exploit your systems using specific techniques like social engineering, without doing any long-term damage. With penetration testing, you can find gaps and vulnerabilities within your current system and better defend against real threat actors in the future.
What does a penetration test assess?
- Internal and external networks
- Authenticated and unauthenticated applications
- Wireless networks
Regularly testing your network enables you to gain key insights on vulnerabilities and your team to fix the problem. Ultimately strengthening your security posture over time.
Why Penetration Testing?
Pen tests are designed to answer the question: What is the real-world effectiveness of my existing controls against an active, skilled attacker? And many compliance standards today require an answer.
Compliance is a significant motivator for most companies when it comes to expanding their cybersecurity programs with penetration testing. Depending on your industry, your business may need to stay in compliance with regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, or ISO 27001. The standards you need to follow will require your company to meet specific objectives, like regularly scheduled penetration testing and security audits.
But, even if some organizations don’t have a compliance box to check, to remain competitive many organizations need to prove that they align with certain standards. Pen testing is one way they do this.
Difenda will ensure your security hygiene is up to par with these compliance regulations and more. Plus, we will issue a Security Certificate upon validating the identified vulnerabilities have been fixed within your network.
Trends in the Industry
As cyber attackers become more sophisticated at infiltrating networks, penetration testing methods will need to evolve with the threat landscape to remain effective. This means pen tests need to continuously use new methods and techniques laser-focused on today’s biggest security challenges. How can they do this? By aligning the focus of their people, processes, and technologies to create a unified approach on beating today’s biggest security issues.
- Coupling manual testing with automation: Most attacks typically leverage repeatable and automated processes to exploit known vulnerabilities. But what about the unknown vulnerabilities?
- Investment in training and certifications: With increased complexities in technology and processes cybersecurity security experts need to come armed with the relevant tools and credentials needed to discover unknown weaknesses in your environment.
- Standardization around frameworks: Everyday new and more stringent regulations are being put into place to standardize and quantify pen testing efforts.
Top Security Challenges with Pen Testing
Pen tests aim to identify weaknesses in your network and regularly testing your network enables you to gain key insights into vulnerabilities. But pen testing often requires a huge time commitment and lots of continual research. In addition, the following penetration testing challenges are affecting almost all businesses:
- An increasing number of endpoints and the Internet of things are creating huge volumes of data and is creating large attack surface.
- Cloud adoption and interconnected devices are rapidly dissolving the perimeter.
- Hiring, training and maintaining security personnel that have the skills to complete remediations.
- New complex frameworks, regulations and compliance standards.
- Operational efforts continue to increase while resources remain relatively the same.
To solve this, many businesses are augmenting their security teams by partnering with penetration testing experts like Difenda.
The Modern Approach to Penetration Testing
We’ve built a strategic approach to penetration testing that is tried, tested and proven in the field. We take a business-first and outcome-based approach to effectively communicate your cyber risk profile.
- Intelligence Gathering: Gather detailed information about internal or external environments.
- Threat Modeling: Identify attack scenarios and associated risks based on environment information.
- Vulnerability Analysis: Systematically identify weaknesses in the environment.
- Exploitation: Conduct proof of concept exploitation of identified weaknesses.
- Post-Exploitation: Identify and exploit privilege escalation vulnerabilities and pivot to other systems.
- Detailed Reporting: Provide detailed reporting on findings along with risk rating, business impact & prioritized remediation recommendations.
Wrapping Up
Difenda’s cybersecurity experts offered a lot of valuable information during the webinar for organizations needing to strengthen their defense with penetration testing. From exploring the current security network to addressing up-and-coming pen testing frameworks, they made it clear that organizations need to be putting expert pen testing at the forefront of their endpoint defense.
Don’t risk choosing an ineffective penetration testing strategy that could cost you. Difenda will asses the security hygiene of your outward presence, including your perimeter devices, servers, applications, and encryption technology. We can target anything that is accessible from the Internet for potential security vulnerabilities.