Penetration Testing

What is Penetration Testing?

• It’s the process of identifying security vulnerabilities in an application by evaluating the system or network with various malicious techniques.
• The purpose of this test is to secure important data from outsiders like hackers who can have unauthorized access to the system.
• Once the vulnerability is identified it is used to exploit the system in order to gain access to sensitive information.

Causes of vulnerabilities:

• Design and development errors
• Poor system configuration
• Human errors

Why Penetration Testing?

• Financial data must be secured while transferring between different systems.
• Many clients are asking for pen testing as part of the software release cycle.
• To secure user data.
• To find security vulnerabilities in an application.

It’s very important for any organization to identify security issues present in internal networks and computers. Using this information organizations can plan defense against any hacking attempt. User privacy and data security are the biggest concerns nowadays. Imagine if any hacker managed to get user details of social networking sites like Facebook. Organizations can face legal issues due to a small loophole left in a software system. Hence big organizations are looking for PCI compliance certifications before doing any business with third-party clients.

What should be tested?

• Software
• Hardware
• Network
• Process

Penetration Testing Types:

1. Social Engineering
2. Application Security Testing
3. Physical Penetration Test
4. Network Services
5. Client Side
6. Wireless

The third process is more common to identify all kinds of vulnerabilities.

Penetration Testing Tools:

Automated tools can be used to identify some standard vulnerabilities present in an application. Pentest tools scan code to check if there is malicious code present which can lead to potential security breaches. Pentest tools can verify security loopholes present in the system like data encryption techniques and hard coded values like username and password.