Penetration Testing

No matter what business you’re in, one of the most important (and worrisome) aspects from a technology standpoint is keeping your data secure. Not to mention that of your customers. But the unfortunate reality is that hackers are working day and night to break into systems and gain access to valuable financial, health, or intellectual property-related data. The question is, how do you figure out where (and how) they might get into your systems, so you can set up barricades ahead of any cyber attack?

Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.  To first do this, you need to think the way the offense of the other team thinks.  In cybersecurity, this is done via penetration (pen) testing which serves the purpose of finding network flaws that could potentially be exploited by attackers sometime in the future.  One statistic that is constantly quoted is how there is a hacker attack every 39 seconds in the U.S. alone. The one thing about this statistic is that it is over 11 years old.  This makes you rethink its current validity and how much more often a hacker attack happens now in comparison to 2007.  Considering that today’s complex cyber security landscape harbors emerging threats on a regular basis, we must face the fact that we encounter a plethora of more vulnerabilities than ever before.

From banking and finance to healthcare, there’s seemingly a web or mobile application for just about every aspect of our personal and business lives. Whether it’s an individual consumer accessing our investment accounts via smartphone, or a business owner managing inventory on a tablet, web applications have come a long way in terms of making our lives easier and more efficient. There’s just one catch. The more we use applications to handle sensitive information, the more tempting it is for hackers to break in an attempt to steal valuable data.

Web penetration testing is an important tool that is used by security professionals to test the integrity of web-facing cyber assets and systems. Penetration testing for web services is necessary to highlight risk factors associated with key vulnerabilities in existing cybersecurity implementations. Despite the importance of web penetration testing, many people outside of the cybersecurity industry fail to recognize the importance of conducting regular penetration testing. In this article, we’ll outline what web penetration testing is, explore web application penetration testing methodology, and discuss why it is a necessary component of any comprehensive security assessment.

Mobile applications (apps) are everywhere.  The iOS App Store is currently home to over 2.2 million apps while the Google Play store currently has more than 3.5 million apps in its inventory.  The mobile app market is set to grow by 385% from now until 2021 which is incredible, but the instances of mobile ransomware are growing by 415% every year.  Don’t let these statistics rain on your parade just yet.  There are tools and techniques that organizations can utilize to limit their chances of being affected by nasty malware.  Keeping your organization’s mobile app(s) and customers protected against this increase in malware means taking a proactive approach towards penetration (pen) testing.  This article aims to provide you, the reader, with a thorough overview on mobile pen testing as well as the types of pen testing methodologies for you to utilize in your organization immediately.