Every organization, whether big or small, depends on an airtight security plan. A robust security plan is a must when planning and strategizing cybersecurity options and assessing the current infrastructure. To do it effectively, it is crucial to analyze the company from the spectacles of a hacker as well. This gives a broader perspective of the vulnerabilities that can become expensive exploits later by hackers. That’s what a penetration test does.
For many months and years, you might have spent almost a fortune and ample time creating security defenses for your firm. It becomes quite an obvious task to monitor and verify whether everything is working well for your company.
When you conduct web pentesting properly, you will get valuable insights into all your firm’s strengths and weaknesses. Like smart contract auditing, web penetration is also a significant process to eliminate the risk of hacks. Read on further about penetration testing and why businesses must conduct it.
Table of Contents
What is a Penetration Test?
Also known as ethical hacking or pen test, a penetration test is an authorized cyberattack that testers perform on a business. Before the hacker breaches the company’s defenses, the testers perform a penetration test to discover real-time vulnerabilities. With this, it even becomes simpler to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a network.
It is also considered to be a major part of the security audit. It is an ideal method of gaining true insight into the company’s security defenses. Interestingly, the hacker’s technique while trying to breach an organization’s security is the same in the web penetration tests. This can include a variety of simulated attacks, such as installing adware, phishing, altering data, identifying open ports, and creating backdoors, etc.
Because they provide information about a company’s security from a hacker’s viewpoint, penetration tests are useful. They might point out weaknesses that security experts may have missed during development or raise awareness of flaws that are far more difficult to find from the inside.
How Often Should You Schedule Penetration Testing For Security?
As an important part of the security process, it is advised that you get this done periodically. If not monthly, then aim to get annual testing done. However, there are certain situations where we recommend getting pentesting done as a must.
These are
- Whenever there are significant upgrades to infrastructure or applications.
- Whenever security patches are applied
- When new digital assets are launched, like cloud services and websites
- When somebody updates or modifies the end-user policies
- When new office locations are established
With so many day-to-day hacks happening, we cannot emphasize the importance of penetration testing more. Let us know some of the main reasons why every business needs to conduct penetration testing.
The Top 5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Penetration Testing.
If you think penetration testing is just a vulnerability scan, you might rethink it. Pen tests are intended to evaluate the efficiency of current security protections in the real world against a knowledgeable attacker who may employ numerous attack techniques to exploit a flaw. That’s useful since it enables you to fix any vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them.
Every business relies upon a penetration test due to the following reasons.
- Shields against data breaches
If you’re someone afraid of hacking exploits these days, then penetration testing is the best way to eliminate it. Before a hacker exploits any vulnerability in your system, you can easily find and fix it using pentest, resulting in saving your organization from expensive data breaches in the future.
One of the main reasons businesses utilize smart contracts technology is its strong security posture. It acts as a mediator between two parties engaged in a transaction. Before writing a single line of code, smart contract audit efforts start to identify potential vulnerabilities. These include re-entrancy, front running, ETH sending a rejection, integer overflow/underflow, DoS, Insufficient Gas briefing, RCE, and many others that are listed in the Smart Contracts Weakness Classification Registry.
- Test the abilities of your network defenders.
A penetration test may evaluate the capacity of the individuals or systems responsible for keeping an eye out for intruders on your network. This can assist in demonstrating the effectiveness of automated intrusion detection systems alternatively if your IT staff has the resources necessary to detect and respond to an attack.
- Enhance the overall security
Pen testing’s nature discloses any critical gaps in cyber security. The found vulnerabilities may be fixed to prevent sensitive information from being stolen by external threats. So, in a way, it enhances the overall security of the system, working on the existing loopholes and rectifying them before a hacker exploits them.
- Maintaining confidentiality, goodwill, and revenue
Legal repercussions and a loss of reputation may occur from failing to preserve the confidentiality of the data. A security breach may impact the accounting records, which would hurt the organization’s income. Enterprises may use penetration testing as a service to learn how long it takes an attacker to compromise a system and to validate that they have adequately trained their security personnel to deal with any threats.
- For the testing of a new implementation of technology
Testing new technology before it enters production is seen to be the ideal scenario. A penetration test on new technologies before they are put into use may frequently save time and money since closing the gaps and vulnerabilities is simpler before the application is put into use.
Is Web Pentest Necessary For Enhancing Cybersecurity?
Yes. It is essential. Security for web applications should not be thought of as a one-time event. Businesses must continuously participate in proactive and consistent web application security measures. There is a need to make sure that there are no vulnerabilities and flaws, even with top-notch security infrastructure and practices. Additionally, technology can only advance firms’ cybersecurity capabilities so far; human skill and intellect will always be superior.
In order to help businesses continuously identify, safeguard, and test the security and performance of their web applications, it is crucial that certified security experts carry out pen testing. They will be able to make the best use of the security testing tools while leveraging automation and other technology.
