Every day, brand new cyber-threat vectors and malware strains are being developed, authored and distributed. Hackers and hacktivist groups are quickly learning how to exploit and penetrate your security system, no matter how tough it is. Siphoning of funds, corrupting and stealing data, theft of user credentials and identities, espionage, sabotage and mayhem are some of the threats and damages hackers can inflict upon your business.
In order to prevent this, you need to perform frequent penetration testing with security penetration testing tools. Penetration testing is more commonly known as ethical hacking, which is basically a group of IT specialists, trying to breach the company’s security systems with the company’s approval. The group of IT specialists can be outsourced by a trusted third party, and they’re given permission to exploit hardware and software for vulnerabilities.
Using security penetration testing tools can be an effective tool for businesses, governments, international and national organisations to asses the security of their data. In other words, penetration testing is used to examine the impact or damage an adversary can cause. It provides a valuable element of surprise, as the testing may be covered as a surprise attack, just to see how the IT staff who are in charge of responding to it can react, without being aware that it’s a test.
Moreover, it can increase your business continuity, which is a top concern for most successful organisations. There are many ways to break a business continuity, and the lack of security loopholes is a major one. Secured systems suffer much less breaches in their availability than the insecure ones. Some of today’s attackers are hired by organisations and competition to stop the continuity of a business by gaining access from vulnerabilities and targeting them with a distributed denial of service that results in crashing the service and breaking the server’s availability.
More importantly, it isn’t only the business that suffers from breaches, but their partners, associated clients and third parties as well. This can be all prevented by regularly assessing the security of the company’s working environment. This is important as more security builds more trust and confidence inside the organisation, and with clients as well.
And lastly, it will help you evaluate your security investments for the future. You get a clear idea of your current security posture and you’ll be able to review its efficiency. You can then work on what needs to be improved, what is and what isn’t working, as well as how much you’ll have to invest to build a more secure environment for your working space.
