How VAPT Testing can Keep Your System Secure?

Vulnerability testing and penetration testing are two important types of processes used in information security but are often confused as the same thing. So, what is vulnerability and penetration testing?

Know the difference between vulnerability and penetration testing:

Vulnerability testing and penetration testing may fall under the same domain, but their functionality and purpose is completely different. Vulnerability testing is performed to check the vulnerabilities of a system while penetration testing performed to assess the system to know:

• The possibility in a computer system makes it allow authorized access by developing certain loopholes in it.
• The system can be shut down for an unknown time because of malicious attacks on it such as DoS attacks, where legitimate user access is denied or limited.

However, vulnerability assessment and penetration testing is like IT audits, therefore, it is preferred to use the services of third parties.

Why a business needs VAPT testing?

The prime purpose of vulnerability and penetration testing is to identify, mitigate, and assess the risks due to system exploitation. Every business organization depending on IT infrastructure needs VAPT to keep in check of any possible vulnerability. The benefit of this testing is that the overall system, including computers, clouds, networks and software (operating system and other programming) are assessed using different techniques to identify known and unknown vulnerabilities of a system. Generally, vulnerabilities in IT system such as software or networks are taken as holes or errors in the system. Improper design, software design, insecure coding, or both factors, for instance, a buffer overflow is a considerable vulnerability of a system, where the limitations of variables and constants are not defined precisely. This vulnerability can be removed by supplying data in a greater amount which is hard to hold by a specific entity.

Types of vulnerability:

There are different types of vulnerabilities, which must be discussed during a VAPT testing.

1. Access Control Vulnerabilities

It is a vulnerability, which usually occurred because of the missing application to certain users or functions that need permission or access. Simply, access control vulnerabilities include access of different files, processes or objects directly without going through any authentication process.

Examples of such vulnerabilities can be:

• Improper file permission
• Access denied
• Weak coding
• Security limitations

2. Authentication Vulnerabilities

This vulnerability occurred due to lack of proper identification mechanisms so that a certain user or process cannot be identified properly. For example:

• Weak passwords (very simple passwords)
• Weak algorithms
• Weak coding

Vulnerability can be given high privileges to less privileged processes (such as root access or administrative access) or users (such as guest users).

3. Boundary Condition Vulnerabilities

Vulnerability due to improper validation mechanisms such that the length of the data is not checked against the size of the data storage or specific resource. Example of boundary condition vulnerabilities can be Buffer overflow and Overwriting the original data in the memory. In most cases, memory is overwritten with some arbitrary code which blocks further access to the system.