What is Penetration Testing and why is it important to your organisation?
Penetration testing involves a controlled attack on your organisation that is designed to exploit weaknesses in your environment. The purpose of these tests is to give your organisation and its security team a better understanding of the weaknesses that can result in a data breach, financial loss and significant downtime to your organisation.
Successful attacks can go undetected for months. The average time to identify a breach in 2020 was 228 days (IBM). In severe incidents, the outcome can be fatal to the organisation.
Types of penetration tests:
- Internal and external infrastructure tests
- Web application tests
- Wireless infrastructure tests
- Client-side tests
- Social engineering tests
The stages:
- Plan the test
- Gather the information
- Scan for vulnerabilities
- Attempt the penetration
- Analyse the results
- Report the vulnerabilities
- Implement a plan of corrective actions
To avoid any unnecessary alarm, penetration testing is carried out under strict conditions that are mutually agreed by the penetration tester and your organisation.
How often?
There are a number of factors that will affect how often you should test your environment. These include:
- Size of your organisation
- Where your organisations data is stored
- Any regulatory compliance that your business must adhere to
Upon completion of a penetration test, your leadership should prioritise the corrective actions based on the risks and their potential to cause significant financial and operational disruption to your organisation.
If you are interested in learning more about our testing services please get in contact. Email: info@enterprisedefence.com Phone: 0818 229 239
