As cybercrimes continue to rise, it is crucial to test the resilience of organisational security. One tactic is penetration testing, often abbreviated to ‘pen testing’. Pen testing is such an important service that it is estimated by 2025, it will be a $4.5 billion industry (Gartner) - but what is it, why do you need it, how often should you conduct one and what are the different types of tests. This blog breaks it all down.
Understanding Penetration Testing
Penetration testing, is a crucial element in developing a robust cybersecurity strategy. It is essentially ethical hacking. It involves simulating controlled cyber-attacks on your organisation’s systems and infrastructure to uncover vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Unlike vulnerability assessments, pen testing goes a step further by attempting to exploit these vulnerabilities to evaluate the impact.
Reasons Why Your Business Might Need Penetration Testing
Risk Prioritisation
Penetration testing helps prioritise risks by focusing on what is most likely to be exploited. This allows you to allocate resources effectively and address any critical vulnerabilities that could lead to significant breaches.
Strengthening Security Measures
Regular pen tests contribute to the ongoing improvement of security processes and strategies. By understanding weaknesses, you can enhance your security controls, making them more resilient to potential cyber threats.
Cost-Effective Risk Mitigation
The financial implications of a data breach can be staggering. Penetration testing enables you to identify and fix vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, reducing downtime, financial losses, and potential damage to your brand’s reputation.
Regulatory Compliance
Penetration testing is often a requirement for compliance with industry regulations. It helps you to demonstrate diligence in addressing vulnerabilities and maintaining a secure environment.
Preserving Brand Reputation
In an era where customer trust is crucial, a penetration test serves as a proactive measure to assure clients that their information is secure. It can be especially crucial before significant contracts, mergers, or supply chain arrangements.
How Often Should You Conduct a Penetration Test?
The frequency of penetration testing depends on various factors, including the size of your organisation, the nature of your business, and the level of risk. Generally, a yearly pen test is recommended, but more frequent testing may be necessary for businesses dealing with sensitive data or undergoing significant infrastructure changes.
How Do You Know What To Test?
Open Source Intelligence gathering is a useful starting point for organisations that aren’t sure what they should test or how they should prioritise testing. A criminal or interested threat actor will first do their online reconnaissance to understand the attack surface area of their target organisation. Our OSINT services are for organisations that want to find out what data is publicly available on them and the security implications of this data. By gathering data from the public and dark/deep web sources Toro will generate a report that supports data handling considerations, current threat profile and targets to be considered for future security assessments.
What are the different types of Penetration Test?
Web Application Testing
Web applications represent an organisation’s public presence, providing information and service consumption for users. The underlying technology has consistently evolved to offer ever more functionality, and historic weaknesses have been mitigated through new standards. Navigating this evolution can be a difficult task for even the most reactive and cutting-edge businesses.
This test will help evaluate your applications and provide guidance on implementing pragmatic security improvements. Testing includes application discovery, underlying technology fingerprinting, vulnerability scanning (through vulnerable dependencies), functionality and workflow mapping and manual application testing.
API Testing
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) present a consolidated set of standards for accessing content and functionality across different clients. In practice this means that you have a single point of interaction for multiple web, desktop, and mobile applications. As with all technology, different standards have evolved to support varied requirements from clients, platforms, and businesses. APIs are well integrated with all front-end services and testing includes method and parameter discovery, underlying technology fingerprinting, functionality and workflow mapping and manual testing.
Infrastructure Testing
Infrastructure underpins all digital services; it is the computing power and the storage that applications run on. Whether in the cloud, on premise, managed by 3rd parties or in a data centre this test will ensure that your infrastructure is securely configured and enforcing the expected security controls. Testing includes host discovery and service scanning, vulnerability scanning and manual penetration testing.
Mobile Application Testing
Mobile applications have taken the functionality historically offered by Web Applications and brought them to mobile devices. Over time the mobile ecosystems have evolved their own set of client-side technologies while leveraging existing web architecture. Testing includes application decomplication and review, a review of the build configuration, storage and transport security evaluation and API testing.
Desktop Application Testing
The applications that run on Linux, Windows and MacOS operating systems. Compared to web, mobile and API technologies, Desktop applications are the most diverse in terms of technologies, architecture, protocol standards, programming languages and frameworks and by extension, security considerations. Testing includes reverse engineering and decomplication, client-side control evaluation and server-side communication testing.
Scenario Based Assessments
Scenario Based Assessments are a great way to evaluate a specific scenario linked to a service rather than comprehensively testing the whole thing. If you already perform periodic testing on a set of assets but have specific concerns, this approach will prove that security controls are performing as you would expect them to.
Possible scenarios can be infinitely tailored, but the following are the most requested:
Assumed Compromise - Working on the assumption that a corporate user’s desktop has been compromised through either malware or device theft, our consultants will see whether they can leverage this foothold to gain further access to wider corporate data, privileged systems, and staff accounts.
Breakout Testing - Organisations will, at times, have a requirement to provide access to services to 3rd party users. This could be to external developers, managed service providers or other vendors. Technologies such as Citrix workspaces, jump boxes and VPNs can be leveraged to provide access under constraint. Breakout Testing is useful for when you need to test these controls and make sure that the intended security controls cannot be subverted.
Stolen Device - If you are a company that issues managed devices to people or enrols them via a managed bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy, you may want to consider what could happen in the event that their device is stolen or mis-used. Testing would focus on what access could be gained from a completely powered down device, or one in a hibernation/sleep state.
Red teaming
Typically, campaign/goal-based, and broader in scope, focusing on improving security posture organisation-wide by simulating higher level and better-resourced threat actors. Due to their more dynamic nature, they are not easily repeatable, and technically they are often quieter to avoid alerting security operations. Test duration is often 2 weeks to 6 months (not always continuous) and can include penetration tests.
Blue team
The Defenders. The internal security team that defends against both real attackers and Red Teams. Different from standard security teams, in that they have a mentality of constant vigilance against attack.
Red Team
The Attackers (or Aggressors). External entities brought in to test the effectiveness of a security program, mimicking the behaviours and techniques of likely attackers in the most realistic way possible.
Purple Teaming
A combination of red teaming (offensive) and blue teaming (defensive) designed to test your Security Operation Centre’s (SOCs) ability to detect, contain, investigate, and remediate real world attacks. By working closely with a SOC point of contact the testers will schedule a suite of offensive exercises that allows the SOC to finely tune their response capability.
Wi-Fi Testing
Wi-Fi technologies are ubiquitous in corporate office environments. Wi-Fi supports daily business activities, connects intercom and video calling equipment, and provides office guests internet access. This test offers physical location Wi-Fi testing to identify which networks are available in your offices, whether they are securely configured and whether someone is hosting a rogue access point in your vicinity.
Source-Code Review
Most testing starts from a front-end perspective meaning that the behaviour of server-side functionality is inferred through behaviour rather than a direct review of the source code. Source-code reviews bring focus to security critical functionality through direct review rather than inference-based testing.
Build & Configuration Review
Services and operating systems can be configured based on the operational requirements of your organisation and the intended user. Developers will have a different set of requirements for their workstations to a HR employee and servers will need to be configured differently to a workstation build. Add in the complexities of cloud hosted services and you have a series of technologies that all need to be secured in different ways. Build & Configuration reviews are a way to bring up any gaps in your configuration.
In the face of escalating cyber threats, penetration testing emerges as a proactive and strategic measure to safeguard your organisation. It helps provide valuable insights into your security posture so you can stay one step ahead of potential attackers. If you want to discuss any of this further, please get in touch.
https://www.torosolutions.co.uk/contact-us