With a vast amount of company operations taking place inside servers and over the internet, it’s vital that businesses and organisations have water-tight software systems.
According to Hiscox, one small business in the UK is successfully hacked every 19 seconds.
Security Testing probes for weaknesses in your software systems to unveil vulnerabilities, bugs, and potential risks in the software application, to help prevent malicious cyberattacks from hackers.
Network Penetration Testing
What is security testing?
Security testing, also known as website security testing or server security, is the process of testing a software program with the intention of finding errors and weaknesses. Once the vulnerabilities are identified, solutions and improvements can be made to enforce the security of the server against hackers.
The testing focuses purely on the identified and potential defects, not the absence of them.
Why is security testing important?
Security testing is important because software application vulnerabilities and defects are incredibly difficult to detect and correct without an expert eye. Identifying errors in the structure of the software systems means that they can be repaired.
Businesses and organisations are a prime target for hackers because their servers house hoards of sensitive information. Small businesses, especially, usually have fewer resources than larger enterprises. Therefore, it can be assumed that they lack appropriate server security, leaving them open to phishing attacks by cybercriminals.
Types of security testing
When undertaking a security test, there are eight complex core practices that an experienced penetration tester can execute, depending on the needs of the client.
Web Application Testing
Web applications are often the most important asset for businesses, since this is often where much of their income will be generated. Application penetration testing is part of an ethical hacking engagement, designed to highlight insecure coding practices and configuration issues in web applications.
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Network Penetration Testing
A network relates to the underlying infrastructure that supports common interfaces, such as web applications. There are two types of network penetration testing: internal and external. As the names suggest, an external network penetration test covers a client’s externally facing network, whereas, an internal test focuses on the client’s internal infrastructure.
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Vulnerability Assessment
Vulnerability assessments utilise various automated testing tools, such as web and network security scanners, collating the results into a severity based hierarchy report. These types of assessments are great for identifying low-hanging fruit security issues, however are only part of the process of a full end to end penetration test.
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Firewall Assessment
A firewall is often the first line of defence for many organisations, and a firewall assessment is a comprehensive configuration review of its rulesets. This type of assessment help ensure a company’s internal and external infrastructure is free from common security vulnerabilities.
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Red Team Engagements
Essentially, a red team assessment is a real world penetration test from a hacker’s perspective. The target can be the technology, staff or the physical premises.
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Build Reviews
A build review is a whitebox test, where the expert is provided with high level privileges in order to find numerous security flaws that might otherwise be missed during a black box assessment.
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Social Engineering
Within the context of cybersecurity, social engineering relates to the human factor within a business. Although an organisation may have the best possible security solutions and measures, the human element has the potential to render them useless.
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Secure Code Reviews
When combined with automated tools and manual techniques, code reviews are perhaps the most effective technique for identifying security flaws. Security based code reviews can greatly benefit a business as it allows for areas of the program or application to be analysed that may have otherwise been inaccessible.
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How a security test is performed
There are six steps involved in the security testing process:
1. Reconnaissance
To get an idea of the client’s security level, a pen testing expert will first conduct an analysis, assessing the potential requirements, using Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
2. Scanning
Using automated scanners, the consultant will delve deeper into the infrastructure of the client’s servers, picking up any surface level weaknesses.
3. Vulnerability assessment
This step involves assessing the results produced by the automated scanners for any false positives. The consultant will then use a range of manual probing and verification techniques to delve deeper into the infrastructure and highlighted vulnerabilities.
4. Exploitation
Next, the vulnerabilities unveiled in the scanning and manual probing stages are raised to the client. Depending on the client’s business operations and the severity of the vulnerabilities, the client may give the consultant the go-ahead to subject certain issues to exploitation attempts.
5. Reporting
After the exploitation attempts have been made, the pen testing consultant will produce a comprehensive report to highlight the impact likelihood of all system defects, and recommend solutions.
6. Retesting
The sixth and final step of the process, offered exclusively at Aardwolf Security, is a free retesting, once the client has actioned their software system solutions, to make sure that their infrastructure weaknesses have been resolved correctly and completely.
Protect your infrastructure
Computer-based devices have become increasingly central to our lives, it is important to ensure that these devices cannot be exploited to allow for an adversary to potentially steal or destroy data. And, as software systems are becoming more complex, the need for security testing is undeniable.
Aardwolf security have been helping protect and secure SMEs against cybercriminals since 2015. With an exclusive focus on penetration testing from CREST qualified penetration testers, Aardwolf Security has the expertise you need to improve your cybersecurity posture and prevent you from becoming a victim of cybercrime.
Our penetration testing services can be tailored to your specific needs, and our team of experts are here to provide impartial information and advice every step of the way.
Get in touch today to speak with one of our Senior Consultants, or fill out our 5-minute online quote form for a bespoke quote today.