Penetration Testing in 2024: Why it's important

Penetration testing (Pentest) is a cybersecurity assessment used to identify weak spots and exploit vulnerabilities in the network, web application, mobile, etc. The goal is to discover weaknesses in the cybersecurity posture, address and mitigate them. Such activity is close to real-world attacks used by malicious actors.

Let’s figure out if it’s worth your time and investments.

Why it’s important?

Hackers

Many malicious actors, whether organized in groups or individuals, spend days and nights searching for ways to breach into companies. Motivation differs from curiosity and glory to money gains. The cybercrime businesses improve their tools, infrastructure, and techniques each day to prepare more sophisticated attacks. It is worth mentioning that developing of generative AI helps to scale and lower the level of entrance for criminals. In the latest cyberattack one of the largest health payment processing company resulted in serious cashflow problems for hospitals due to connectivity issues and unavailability of application. Moreover, 6TB of data was potentially exfiltrated due to this attack.

As far as we can see, hacking activity is really profitable and keeps a new generation of hackers to keep companies across the world under constant pressure and risk. From ransomware gangs to state hackers, one thing is clear it’s hard to withstand such skillful and powerful foes by your own.

Technical debt and technology complexity

Instead of incrementally changing and replacing outdated systems, many organizations continue to expand their tech stack. Rather than untangling complex dependencies and configurations, companies opt to integrate more technology. Lack of knowledge and experience in implementing such changes can result in security gaps.

While many IT teams understand that adapting is crucial for security, most are unable to upgrade their entire infrastructure each time a new threat arises. Instead, they depend on tried-and-true systems. However, combining legacy systems with modern technology increases the risk of cyberattacks by introducing vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, it’s also true that complexity makes it hard to notice issues.

Attackers are using complexity to their advantage by exploiting outdated systems with CVEs, negligence, and misconfigurations to find gaps and gain control over the systems.

Lack of visibility (or know your enemy)

New vulnerabilities and attack techniques arise and keeping track of it, can be a hard task, as well as choosing the right protection strategy inside your product. Identification of all possible vulnerabilities like race conditions, cache poisoning, business logic issues, etc. can be even more complex and left unnoticeable.

Some vulnerability scanning tools can give you a false sense of security. After reviewing multiple findings, you may have a feeling that the job is done and have no worries at all. At the same time, automated tools lack the depth to discover more complicated issues and you may miss some critical issues not covered by the tool. In addition, such tools are known for a huge amount of false positives. As a result, the time of the team isn’t spent efficiently and can lead to fatigue.

The ways to handle it

Cybersecurity challenges can be hard to solve on your own. But it doesn’t mean you have to

The price for security incidents can be overwhelming and can’t be treated as unserious. Even the smallest mistake can cause immense complications. Proactively searching for gaps is a better strategy than waiting for them to appear and trying to apply mitigation in a hurry. Even more, the quick fix can be ineffective or require a great amount of time to fix which leaves the system and clients unprotected.

The first step to lowering risk exposure, protecting against modern threats, and being informed about your strong and weak sides is organizing penetration testing. Even if you are upgrading or rebuilding your system, launching a new product, or completing compliance requirements, the insights received from security assessment can be tremendous.

If you want to learn more about how to protect your assets, you can reach us here.