Automate & Increase the Frequency of Your Penetration Testing.
Penetration Testing – How things stand currently.
Penetration testing for many businesses is a periodical exercise carried out by an external consultant to identify security flaws and misconfigurations within their networks and IT infrastructure. When performed correctly the information discovered in a penetration test can be used to close down security vulnerabilities and therefore protect the organisation by reducing the overall risk from cyber-attack or other malicious actors seeking to compromise systems and gain access to valuable data.
Penetration testing can be a time consuming and expensive exercise, in addition to testing there is also the added overhead of carrying out remediation measures following a penetration test to address and fix the exposed vulnerabilities which again, can add to the cost if undertaken by external resource. This burden of cost and time required often means that some organisations only perform the minimum level of testing necessary to meet their basic needs or compliance requirements, which is somewhat counter-intuitive and comparatively reckless.
Next generation testing
Automating the penetration testing process via the introduction of a software/platform-based technology solution goes a long way to solving the issues with cost and time investment, it also brings a levels of efficiency and economies of scale which can be leveraged to provide increased frequency of validation against IT networks and infrastructure. Some automated solutions also have the benefit of built-in remediation wizards & wikis which allow in house IT teams to better understand identified vulnerabilities, any associated exploits and most importantly; how to prioritise and apply remediation measures.
Automated testing is carried out at machine speed, thereby testing more elements of a network in a shorter period of time and often to a greater depth of investigation and consistency. There is also the significant advantage of being able to rapidly update the testing tool to “teach” it to identify the latest cyber-attack & hacking techniques, something that could take a significant amount of time for a human pen tester.
The advantages of automated testing
The benefits with automated testing continue once a set of tests are created and saved, these can be scheduled to run on a regular monthly, weekly or even daily basis, and once remediated, the resulting reports can be combined to demonstrate improved cyber posture over time. Consistency and increased frequency of testing produces a best practice model that is often unachievable using the equivalent human pen testing alternative.
The moves, changes and updates to our networks and infrastructure occur much more frequently with the ever increasing emphasis and dependency being placed on agility and the capability to deliver flexible and accessible IT wherever the business might need it, it is therefore vital we move forwards with increasing the frequency of testing all aspects our IT security model and penetration testing should be at the centre of this concentration. The need for a manual human pen test may continue but there is a very obvious requirement for automated penetration testing to deliver more frequent validation of infrastructure, timely vulnerability elimination and an overall risk reduction for the business.
Blog written by Howard Johnson, Cyber Practice Lead – https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsonhoward.
Further Information and Tools.
Automated Penetration Testing Quote Tool, 8 questions is all it takes to get a quote, click here.
Further information information about Automated Penetration Testing Tool, click here.
To check out our other cyber security blogs click here.
