Thanks to Penetration Testing, you don’t have to wait to find out what may be lurking in your network before it’s too late.

As brilliant as cloud computing may be, not only for allowing businesses of all sizes to easily adopt scalable, flexible ways of working while cutting down on overall costs, its rapid adoption over the last few years has also made more companies vulnerable to the threats of cybercrime.

When it comes to data breaches and the future of your company, the cliché of prevention being better than a cure has never been more apt.

According to our research, cyberattacks on businesses, especially SMEs, are increasing steadily year-on-year. It also takes most organisations about 280 days to identify and contain a breach costing R30 million on average.

Increasing digitisation, coupled with South Africa’s low investment in cybersecurity and immature cybercrime legislation mean our country is a prime target for cybercrime. Unfortunately, it doesn’t cost much to become a cybercriminal these days, with hacking software going for cheap on the dark web and botnets available for hire at a moment’s notice.

The Best Defence is a Good Offence – The Beauty of Pen Testing

When it really comes down to it, Penetration Testing is ethical hacking. It involves allowing a trusted party – like Armata – to take a deep dive into your networks and applications to systematically probe for vulnerabilities and find just the kind of thing a hacker might exploit before it’s too late.

This form of controlled pseudo hacking doesn’t cause any damage or disrupt valuable business hours, but rather provides a detailed report of where and how to prioritise your cybersecurity efforts.

Network tests focus on issues like access to servers, firewall strength, Wi-Fi security and other holes in the network, while application tests are meant to uncover any vulnerabilities in user input fields and access online. This could be the result of insecure session management or SQL injection opportunities. Pen Tests don’t have to be done internally either, they can happen externally too for a more accurate idea of how easily (or not) a data breach could occur.

This is also where social testing comes in. This involves testing employees’ cybersecurity knowledge and awareness of social engineering tactics like phishing mails.

Penetration Testing – The Armata Way

We first introduced our Pen Test offering towards the end of last year, one that includes eight comprehensive stages instead of the standard five:

  • Information Gathering
  • Administrative Interface
  • Authentication and Access Control
  • Configuration Management
  • Input Validation
  • Parameter Manipulation
  • Session Management
  • Business Logic

All of these stages follow industry frameworks to provide best practices for companies to better manage and reduce the risk of cyberattacks, internally and externally.

To read more about our belief in the importance of Penetration Testing and what could have an impact on its efficacy in the coming months, download the Armata Penetration Testing Whitepaper here.