What Is Penetration Testing and Why Is It Important?

Have you heard about a fish tank helping to hack a casino? Seeing something like this in a movie might have seemed like a contrived plot twist and that’s-too-much vibe. However, it happened in real life, reminding companies about the importance of security testing once again.

The Value of Security Testing

People globally have become more dependent on various digital services – from entertainment apps to video conferencing tools, telehealth services, and much more. And the more digitized the world gets, the more dangers await users online.

Engaging security testing providers in the software development process allows building a reliable infrastructure that can withstand a variety of potential dangers. Security testing goes beyond ethical hacking. It entails a quality audit of the SDLC pipeline, revision of company processes and infrastructure, and much more.

In this article, you will learn about one of the popular security testing requests – penetration testing. With penetration testing, companies can:

• Detect issues and bottlenecks in working processes.
• Optimize the SDLC for flawless software delivery.
• Avoid data breaches or leakages and associated reputation risks.
• Develop and maintain a highly secure business environment.

So let’s find out a bit more about the particularities of penetration testing and how this process goes.

What Is Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing, or simply pen testing, is a cyberattack simulation conducted with some restrictions by ethical hackers. These restrictions are what make a pentest different from an actual attack. They include:

• Law (how much a team can break without breaking the law).
• Time (the tests have a set timeline).
• Budget (it usually depends on the time and effort required for testing).
• Depth (how far the team will go to break into the system).

So technically, penetration testing is a rather careful and compromising approach to hacking. Since the specialists don’t pursue malicious purposes, they don’t go all out and respect the organization’s boundaries.

Pentest Profile

Definition: a pentest (short for penetration test) is an attempt to break into a company’s network to exploit its weaknesses related to technology used, established processes, and a human factor.

Provider: often an external contractor – an outsourced QA company specializing in security testing.

Purpose: to detect vulnerabilities, evaluate the potential risks cybersecurity incidents can cause, and validate the efficiency of the current security measures.

Peculiarities: the team relies on business intelligence and product peculiarities to prepare attack scenarios.

When to run:

• On a regular basis to ensure efficient security management.
• After modifying or upgrading software infrastructure.
• Following the changes in end-user policies.
• When opening a new branch office or after relocation.
• After changes in a company’s business processes.

Outcomes: gathering actionable insights to prepare countermeasures for real-life attacks – prevent incidents, reinforce security, mitigate the effects of a potential threat, etc.

Value: engaging ethical hackers in testing allows companies to detect different kinds of vulnerabilities and fix these issues before attackers discover and exploit them.

Software Development and QA Trends to Watch in 2022

What Is Not Penetration Testing?

People tend to use the term “penetration testing” as a synonym for security testing, often implying a vast range of other checks. Let’s focus on what doesn’t fall under this category (though can be equally significant for a company).

• Cybersecurity technical audit – a structured process of reviewing the entire system (software and hardware configurations, company processes) according to the defined regulations and compliance standards.
• App security testing – testing mobile/web applications for technical vulnerabilities (security biases) and business logic weaknesses.
• Vulnerability scanning – a quick check performed using special tools and followed by automated report generation. It gives an outlook on vulnerabilities and potential security issues. Unlike pentests, it doesn’t provide sufficient information about the context and does not account for individual environments.
• Red-blue teaming – cybersecurity lessons that involve two teams: offensive and defensive. The Red Team consists of external security professionals. They prepare a plan of attack based on the weaknesses in technology, processes, and people and try to access valuable assets. The Blue Team is an internal team that has to strengthen its cybersecurity strategies, identifying the critical assets and protecting them.
• Internal penetration testing – a pentest performed from the company’s internal network. It doesn’t provide the full picture of vulnerabilities but shows how much damage a dissatisfied or careless employee can cause.
• Bug bounty – recognition and compensation for third-party specialists detecting vulnerabilities in a system. Bug bounty is a practice used by a large number of companies, including Microsoft and Google.

Each of the mentioned cyber security checks has its value and place in the testing pipeline. Usually, one type of security check complements the other, working best in combination.

If you have a general request for security testing, ask for details – what services a company can provide and what will work best for your case.

If you come with a more specific request – for vulnerability scanning, SAST, compliance check, risk assessment, SDLC audit, or something else – make sure the activity you imply is what actually comes in this service and will be sufficient to assure security at this stage.

Penetration Testing Process

To get a better understanding of the penetration testing process, let’s look into approaches to this quality inspection and a typical workflow.

Approaches to Penetration Testing

There are several approaches to penetration testing, classified based on the testing specialist’s perspective. To be clearer, a white hat hacker can work with different levels of awareness of the system:

• Zero knowledge – testing as attackers. A person hasn’t used the software before but is eager to break it, relying on the available data and experience with technologies they already have.
• Full knowledge – testing as developers. People who coded the product already suspect what areas are prone to vulnerabilities. They can try to verify a hypothesis by experiment or reject it.
• Some knowledge – testing as users with some data. Users are familiar with the system on the front end and use this knowledge to dig deeper into the backend.

You might have heard about similar approaches in relation to other types of testing – black box, white box, and gray box testing. Which one to use, depends on the approach a security testing provider can offer and/or how much of the information you are willing to share.

Black Box vs White Box Testing: Do You Need Both?

How Is It Different from a Real Attack?

Since penetration testing recreates a real attack with some limitations, the focus and mechanics of these two events will differ. As a result, the stages each process goes through are also different.

Stages of penetration testing:

Stages of real cyberattacks (kill-chain):

1. Reconnaissance – exploring software systems and/or processes.
2. Weaponization – developing malware to target the discovered vulnerabilities.
3. Delivery – delivering weaponized malware through a phishing email or other medium.
4. Exploitation – breaching the system and exploiting an organization’s resources.
5. Installation – installing a backdoor that provides access for the intruder.
6. Command & control – gaining control over an organization’s network.
7. Exfiltration – extracting confidential data from the system.

The differences in execution, however, aren’t a reason to question the efficiency of pentests. Penetration testing enables you to work in proactive mode. Obviously, the cyber security specialists won’t deliver the attack and exfiltrate data. Still, they allow detecting areas prone to breaches, potential delivery scenarios, and ways to protect valuable data.

Documentation and Deliverables

The findings are concluded and shared with a client’s team. There are several types of documents that provide clear explanations for both technical and non-technical specialists:

• Summary (for non-tech managers).
• General report (for tech team).
• Tech details (main source for tech specialists).
• Raw data (for tech specialists).

Thus, everyone authorized to access the findings will have a report with the necessary information and relevant commentaries to get a clear picture of the company’s security state.

To Sum Up

Even not-so-obvious weaknesses and vulnerabilities can lead to significant damage if explored by a malicious user. With well-planned security testing, you get an opportunity to minimize the risks of hacking software or company infrastructure. In the end, taking a proactive approach without having an immediate risk of cyber attack is always a better decision than dealing with the consequences.