How to hire freelance security consultants

Security Consultants are professionals proficient in security functions, assessing the vulnerability and identification of risk assessments of different industry projects. These consultancy services are vital to make an honest assessment, especially when the Government agencies cannot do their job because of several issues of under-staffing and budgetary stuff. A project is considered vulnerable if it is not assessed against present security threats because of the increased security threats every day. It is often recommended to go through several audits in a year to prevent the occurrence of any vulnerability.

What security consultants do?

• Security consultants serving in UK are crucial for running a successful business in the UK because most of the brands face more than thousand attacks every week and seriously if there is no security than these popular brands will vanish away very easily. These security consulting companies offer liaising services between their private clients and law enforcement agencies.
• Security consultants are essentially advisors who utilize their experience, knowledge and resources to recommend different procedures, tools, software, etc. to reduce and mitigate any kind of cyber threats before they actually do something with their client’s system.
• In case these consultants are called when a threat actually damage the whole system, they analyze the system, assess the policies and identify the responsible party, they also suggest how to prevent and get back the system.
• They not only assess the virtual system, but also consider the physical elements of a system and assess in order to identify the loopholes.
• They work on detailed documentation as they want to help their clients in getting the best security service.
• They suggest the company recommends to enhance their security system and how to proceed and use corrective measures to take. It is imperative for the consultant to stay unbiased throughout the procedures so that the whole process remained unprocessed.
• A security consultant can have multiple domains in which they can operate in various domains such as risk assessment, technical surveillance counter measures to name a few.

All these functions need proficiency and technical skills to do the job. Moreover, security jobs need plenty of areas to consider while assessing the system. Few of the domains may include checking and verifying the physical office and also seeing what is inside the virtual system. There are plenty of great things a security consultant can do because they use all their experience and technical knowledge in making things successful. Moreover, professional security analysis can assess what functions or measures may be needed to ensure the security of a system. These consultants have thorough experience in assessing even the minor vulnerability to ensure the highest standard of security.

Moreover, they have plenty of experience and expertise to treat such kind of issues in order to get out of risky environments. They help companies in making long term policies which can be implemented with the working culture of a company to ensure the overall security of the system.

How to choose only reputed cloud security services?

Cloud technology is considered as next-gen technology. A lot of research and development work is in progress on this one specific domain. More and more businesses are taking advantage of cloud services to manage their storage operations. But to access these functional services there have been always a huge need for professional cloud security services that ensures that every business cloud stays protected and away from access to harmful factors.

However, hiring a trustworthy security supplier for your company might be a piece of cake. There are many service providers with huge corporate brand identities, but lower class services. How not to be fooled by them? Well, here are some important factors that must be considered when choosing a cloud security service provider.

Check Reliability and Reputation

It is imperative to understand the company you are going to hire. The company’s reliability and reputation must be checked prior to hiring them. It is really important to look at the client list of your chosen security service provider and track their success rate. The best way to verify about the reputation of a company is to meet some of their clients and understand what they actually have about this one company. This is a great way to track their success rate and also it will help you in analyzing how your company can take benefit from this one specific company.

Suitability

It is really important to understand whether your company has suitability to move into cloud technology and what kind of the cloud environment can better suit your needs. To understand the suitability of different types of cloud services will help you in choosing which service provider will be sufficient for you (you can also choose those who are going to give your services on a trial basis). This way you can actually track which cloud will suit you as it will help you how a specific cloud can help you.

Support and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Support services and Service level agreements are vital when a cloud service is borne downtime. When looking for the services offered by your chosen cloud service provider do look into the support commitment agreement it is offering as it will help you in the future to combat with different challenges. You should look into the agreement of companies and only select those offer fast support services that have more open time as this will increase their availability. Always see their support department on your own and look at how they treat their clients as it will help you in making a wis decision.

Security of the Cloud

Security of the cloud is equally important as it is purchased cloud in reality. It is really important to understand ways how the chosen company will protect the cloud. The stored data will obviously be confidential and extremely important with a high priority need to be protected against malicious activities. That is, why do ask how your selected company will protect the most important data of your company.

Overview of penetration testing

Penetration testing or Pen testing is now in the discussion of top security journals and obviously the reason is not hard to guess – computer systems are getting complicated and to ensure their security now we need comprehensive security plans. Companies are realizing the importance of security paradigm and now investing a lot in getting the best security for their networks and systems. But they are analyzing their system to check vulnerabilities at different levels. This is the point where penetration testing comes under discussion. So what is pen-testing, how to do that and what kind of tools are used in different media industries?

What is Penetration Testing?

It is kind of testing where the areas of weakness in software systems in terms of security are assessed to determine the vulnerabilities, and that can be broken into or not.

How is it performed?

Penetration testing is one of a kind of testing that is a usually the part of complete security paradigm. Here it is broken into important steps so that everyone can understand what the real science behind it is.

Step 1: It starts with a list of vulnerabilities/potential issues that can cause irreversible security issues in the system.

Step 2: Most common these issues are assigned numbers to show their priority or criticality.

Step 3: Device penetration tests that would work (attack your system) from both internal and external aspects to determine if you can access data/network/server/web site unauthorized.

Step 4: If the unauthorized access is possible, the system has to be corrected and the series of steps which must be taken should be written or documents or determine at this stage.

So now the question is who performs the penetration testing – well, obviously testers/ network specialists or simply security consultants.

Penetration tools:

However, there are companies who are willing to do penetration testing using their own resources, especially if they are small-sized companies ¬– here is the list of few amazing tools that can be used to do penetration testing Dubai. These are three top tools in our list:

1) Metasploit

2) Wireshark

3) w3af4
Let’s have a detailed discussion on these few important tools.

Metasploit pen testing tool

This is one of the most advanced and popular frameworks that can be used for pen-testing. It is usually based on the concept of “exploit” which is a code that can easily surpass the security measures and enter a specific system. If entered, it usually runs a payload, a set of code that actually performs operations on the target machine, creating the perfect framework for penetration testing and the benefit of this tool is that it can be used individually. And it is used on almost all platforms such as Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Wireshark

Wireshark is basically a protocol analyzer – famous among testers for its ability to provide the minutest details about your network protocols, decryption and packet information, etc. It can also be used on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and many others.

w3af

W3afis a Web Application Attack and Audit Framework having some great features of fast HTTP requests, web integration and proxy servers into the code. It can also be used on all above-mentioned platforms.

Better late than never, get your business PENETRATION TESTED now!!!

Many businesses are now prospering with the aim of prospering further without caring about how their carelessness can lead to hopeless disasters. Reason being nowadays IT professionals are becoming more and more educated and some of the ill minded people among them easily get indulged in wrong activities such as business related hacking, scams, data theft, etc. Since they have already ample skills and education so they easily succeed in doing so such activities.

Therefore to be careful and take pre-cautionary actions against such mischievous persons, it is mandatory for every Entrepreneur or stake holders to get their organizations penetration tested. Penetration testing is specifically important in Dubai because it is the business hub of middle east with a vast amount of establishments of local and foreign brands of multiple product/service categories. Businesses here range from small low scale less riskier set ups to mid-sized and large scale high risk businesses which have a penetration testing as their pre requisite of operating smoothly in the short as well as long run. Hence penetration testing in Dubai is very crucial.

 

But what benefit will your company receive from spending on this area of business?

• It is better to act proactively cautious than to show concern when things have gone wrong: Research says that major businesses who don’t realise the significance of penetration testing at the right stage, end up paying financial as well as reputational costs. Sudden virus or hacking may bring in bad impact for the organisations as it can lose financial income due to such interruptions, it can attract press to spoil its image, it can even lose its clientele because of low quality service for the time being. Had it been penetration tested earlier, it would have been safe from all such hassles.
• Preservation of information 24/7 gets very problematic: With the increasing complexity of newer viruses and hacking tactics, companies having pre-established defence mechanism even may not be able to protect their crucial data and information from external malicious people and their techniques of spoiling your business. Through penetration testing, you get your firewall, cryptography, user control access, IDS/IPS and other important defence mechanisms checked from all corners and hence as a result there is no chance left for any 3rd party to intrude in your business through malicious techniques.
• Categorising of business security related risks and their execution: Through getting your business penetration tested, different available as well as anticipated security threats are prompted out which an internal IT in charge might not have been able to prompt out to the business because of lack of expertise in the area of work. This is where our expertise brings out fruitful results for your business leaving no corner for an external malicious activity to take place in damaging your business.