What to look when hiring experts for security testing

Cyber criminals are making lot of buzz by attacking on top websites and bypassing their tight security to gain potential data. Data loss due to such activities in 2014 cost more than $400 billion level. And in case your website or network holds sensitive data such as credit cards data or other private credentials is lost, it will become nearly impossible to bring back the trust of your customers and keep the integrity of your business.

These cyber criminals are attacking directly to e-commerce websites, financial hubs, stoke exchanges, manufacturing, entertainment and leading IT companies. There are countless factors that can make your system vulnerable and allow access to different kind of data and let these hackers do the manipulation. But one complete vulnerability and penetration testing can help the company to know the vulnerabilities of a system. This kind of testing allows the company to take proactive actions that will further help them in protecting their system lot better. However, this is an ongoing war between hackers and companies and that is VAPT testing is introduced which is conducted on regular basis to keep things better. This kind of testing is comprised of two type of testing such as:

Vulnerability testing: The first thing to understand what kind of vulnerability already exists in the system in the IT architecture, the server, the network and the access and authentication process.

Penetration testing: next part is to understand the breaches in the security system and find these breaches in your defenses.

And to do VAPT testing specialized expertise are required including technical knowledge and experience. It is true that since long we have been learning OS vulnerabilities, but do you know that applications have their own vulnerabilities. Internet is being an open system and activities which were based on trust between its users and despite its millions of benefits many issues raised that needs serious discussions. The latest vulnerability found in the internet system is DNS vulnerability that is giving huge space to phishers. Wireless networks add another dimension to the problem, SQL injection, and session management exploitation is some of the techniques used to get into a system.

So, to beat such approach there is high urge find someone who is best in VAPT testing, but how you would know, here are few ways:

• Always look for 3P capability in your chosen team. 3P’s means People, Processes and portfolio.
• Always trust a team that has experience as it is the key to know their success rate.
• Undergo thorough search to understand the key skills of your chosen team.
• Professional people have their mark, so ask your peers or management teams or look into testimonials and verify them.
• Understand their processes of testing and how they will organize every element.
• Ask them about time as it is money so, never underestimate this great aspect.

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.

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.