What is Penetration Testing?
Enabling Security Professionals to Interpret, Prioritize and Act on Data
What is Penetration Testing?
Enabling Security Professionals to Interpret, Prioritize and Act on Data
Penetration testing offers many benefits, allowing you to:
As you can see, obtaining a penetration-testing software or hiring a pen-tester to test your network is a proactive effort of protecting your network and business from risks before attacks or security breaches occur.
Security breaches and any related interruptions in the performance of services or applications, can result in direct financial losses, threaten organizations’ reputations, erode customer loyalties, attract negative press, and trigger significant fines and penalties.
Traditionally, organizations have sought to prevent breaches by installing and maintaining layers of defensive security mechanisms, including user access controls, cryptography, IPS, IDS and firewalls. However, continued adoption of new technologies, including some of these security systems, has made it even harder to find and eliminate all of an organizations’ vulnerabilities and protect against many types of potential security incidents.
Pen-testing evaluates an organization’s ability to protect its networks, applications, endpoints and users from external or internal attempts to circumvent its security controls to gain unauthorized or privileged access to protected assets.
Penetration testing should be performed on a regular basis to ensure more consistent IT and network security management. A pen-tester will reveal how newly discovered threats or emerging vulnerabilities may potentially be assailed by attackers. In addition to regularly scheduled analysis and assessments required by regulatory mandates, tests should also be run whenever:
Pen-tests provide detailed information on actual, exploitable security threats. By performing a penetration-test, you can proactively identify which vulnerabilities are more critical, which are less significant and which are false positives. This allows your organization to more intelligently prioritize remediation, apply needed security patches and allocate security resources more effectively to ensure that they are available when and where they are needed most.
Recovering from a security breach can cost an organization millions of dollars related to IT remediation efforts, customer protection and retention programs, legal activities and more.
Penetration testing helps organizations address the general auditing/compliance aspects of regulations. The detailed reports that pen-tests generate can help organizations avoid significant fines for non-compliance and allow them to illustrate ongoing due diligence in to assessors by maintaining required security controls to auditors.
Every single incident of compromised customer data can be costly in terms of both negatively affecting sales and tarnishing an organization’s public image. With customer retention costs higher than ever, no one wants to lose the loyal users that they’ve worked hard to earn, and data breaches are likely to turn off new clients. Penetration testing helps you avoid data incidents that put your organization’s reputation and trustworthiness at stake.
Did you know Core Security offers a full scope of penetration tests? Our consultants can execute on any of the following types of pen-tests pending your business needs. Curious as to what these entail and what sort of findings you will obtain after conducting this service?
Our comprehensive penetration testing services mimic an attacker seeking to access sensitive assets by exploiting security weaknesses existing across multiple systems. For more information read here.
An application penetration tests your custom web applications as well as standard applications like antivirus, embedded applications, games and other system applications. Check out what we offer here.
We offer many wireless penetration services involving security tests of standard corporate Wi-Fi networks to assessments of specialized wireless solutions. Learn more here!
Learn about all of the features and benefits of Core Impact and how they can simplify testing for your organization.