According to leading insurance company, Lloyd’s Australia was vulnerable to a $16 billion cyber attack risk last year. While many companies averted the risk, the need to keep developing even better security systems is ever growing.
This is why company owners are constantly investing in vulnerability scans and penetration tests to ensure they can deal with any sort of attack.
Penetration testing works by examining the risks web application, servers and networks are exposed to. It exploits the threats, allowing developers to create security measures or even better controls that work around those threats. The testing is typically stopped when the objective is achieved.
In the modern online environment, companies need to conduct rigorous web application penetration testing due to the following reasons:
· To make sure effective controls have been implemented
· To identify the weaknesses in web applications, hardware and management to ultimately develop better controls
· To test applications that are often breached or attacked
· To discover vulnerabilities, bugs and risks caused by updates or patches
If websites are attacked through social engineering, this circumvents, the stringent security protocols and highlights least protected assets. Perhaps the worst possible situation is to have a risky vulnerability within the infrastructure and not be aware of it while the attackers keep stealing information.
As the leading penetration testing service in Australia, we have hundreds of cases where the attackers went undetected for months before the clients reached out to us.
Apart from highlighting potential risks within web applications and websites, penetration testing also helps examine an organisation’s ability to avert those risks. At the same time, business owners should also focus on protecting themselves from external risks along with identifying compromised individuals within their organisations. Internal testing should also include controls between different security zones to make sure they are appropriately configured.
As experts in the field, we advise you to conduct regular penetration tests. Doing so will protect you against recent threats. The frequency should be based on the type of testing conducted and the test targets. There are variety of standards like the PCI DSS that recommend preferable intervals for different scan types.
Whether you are deploying new infrastructure or need to test web application security, our penetration testing services can help. Get in touch with us to learn more about our web application security services and how we help hundreds of companies safeguard themselves and their customers.