Why do you need to conduct penetration tests?

Security executives need to align their investments with business goals and justify their activities with a favourable return on investment, whether that is through risk reduction, business enablement or financial savings.

Penetration tests are an important part of the process of identifying, measuring and communicating your cyber risks so that smart risk mitigation can be implemented. With the results of a successful pen test, you can show that the investments you are making have actual benefits that will support your organisation’s overall business objectives.

 

Six good reasons to hire our 'Pen Testers':

Number 1: Reduce risk: Frequent and comprehensive penetration testing means that your organisation can more effectively anticipate and assess emerging security risks, and thus prevent unauthorised access to critical systems and valuable data.

Number 2: Identify/remove vulnerabilities: Penetration testing should be performed on a regular basis to identify vulnerabilities and reveal how they may be exploited to gain unauthorised access to your system.

Number 3: Strengthen your defences: Pen testing helps safeguard your organisation against failure by helping you to put in place effective controls that prevent financial losses through fraud (hackers, extortionists and disgruntled employees) or lost revenue due to unreliable business systems and processes.

Number 4: Demonstrate due diligence: Proving due diligence and compliance to your industry regulators, customers and shareholders is vital in today’s competitive business environment. Non-compliance can result in your organisation losing business, receiving heavy fines, gathering bad PR or ultimately failing.

Number 5: Improve your system: Penetration testing evaluates your organisation’s ability to protect its networks, applications, endpoints and users from external or internal attempts to circumvent its security controls to gain unauthorised or privileged access to protected assets. Test results validate the risk posed by specific security vulnerabilities or flawed processes, enabling IT management and security professionals to prioritise remediation.

Number 6: Prove new systems and software: In addition to regularly scheduled analysis and assessments to comply with contractual and regulatory requirements, penetration tests should also be run whenever:

• new network infrastructure or applications are added;
• upgrades or modifications are applied to your system;
• new office locations are established;
• security patches are applied; or
• end user policies are modified.

Today’s Web applications typically use TCP Port 80. Traditional firewalls are unable to identify or effectively control any Internet applications on this port without slowing down business traffic that relies on the http protocol.

Threats are constantly evolving and changing:

• More and more applications are directing traffic by default through ‘http’ to bypass firewall rules.
• Malware can be downloaded automatically.
• Websites can be infected by code injection, cross-site scripting and other similar Black Hat techniques.
• Your website traffic can be hijacked.
• Blacklisting by major search engines can lose you business.

 

 

Are you an IT Manager? Do you want to read the technical details of our Vulnerability and Penetration Testing Services?

IT Governance can also help you to implement projects involving:

• ISO27001
• Information Security
• BS25999
• Risk Management
• PCI DSS Compliance
• Data Protection, Records Management and Information Governance
• IT Service Management
• ITIL^® and ISO/IEC 20000