Need For Security Audit With Penetration Testing

As an organization securing your networks and mobile devices is extremely important. Thus, it is likely that you may have the finest anti-virus and security devices in your facility. You may think that once this is installed you are almost fully safe from all technical issues. However, you may be infact most vulnerable to malware and viruses. Surprised? Read on to know more.

Just by installing an effective security system, you may sit completely relieved. You need to know the exact weaknesses and strengths of your system, before any external source breaches security. This is why you need to have security audits every now and then.

This audit is nothing but a meaningful use security risk analysis. This means that instead of waiting for an outside source to breach your network and understand its vulnerability, you use an internal penetration method to know the same. Thus, you purposely breach the security and network in a controlled environment and check of blind spots, weaknesses and more. Along with this, these tests will also show whether there has been a Return on Investment of existing implemented security controls, such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, or implemented application defenses.

This type of system comes in three different ways depending on your organization as well as potential of attack.

1. External Penetration Test: This is a way to enter your system by trying to hack the security in a controlled way. Here, you firewalls, publicly accessible services and IP addresses may be probed.
2. Web Application Penetration Test: Just like the external penetration testing, this is too done by understanding the threats that lay outside of your network. However, this is limited to working on web based applications and software.
3. Internal Penetration Test: what if you have a hacker in your company, or worse there is an unintentional leak of data within the organization; this is why you need to check the entire network as well as security measures that may be accessible by the employees and workers.

A combination of these three tests will ensure that you may analyze the real-world security risks under the guidance of actual security experts that manually monitor the threats. Along with this, you may also know you blind spots and weak areas with the help of a vulnerability scan, which is typically performed in minutes by an automated scanning tool. The former is carried out annually or quarterly, while the latter needs more attention, hence may be conducted daily or weekly.

By Steve Henry Author