To keep winning in the never-ending cybersecurity battle, you have to know you are protected. The best way to reach it is to conduct a security assessment of your digital assets, which, in most cases, will be called penetration testing.

Penetration testing, aka pentesting, is a valuable activity that provides a baseline for planning further activities, aimed to improve the cybersecurity posture of the organization.  

The penetration testing would be a combination of offensive actions taken against some web application, network, cloud infrastructure, or other digital assets, in a controlled manner, without intent to damage the operations of the organization, and by a specially trained ethical hacker. 

The purpose of these offensive actions would be to compromise existing cybersecurity defense and take control over the tested digital asset, to “penetrate”, in other words. Penetration testing is a sophisticated and complex process designed to identify, exploit, and report vulnerabilities in the tested asset and provide advice on their remediation. All the valuable information collected during the penetration testing process will be included in the Penetration Test Report, which main part would be a comprehensive list of discovered vulnerabilities, each with a CVSS score, showing the level of its criticality.

Pen Testing Services has become a popular and demanded service for good reasons. First and foremost, they provide actionable data for all the technical (and business) executives and managers, that allows making all further cybersecurity efforts more focused and resultative. Organizations get a real chance to remove the vulnerabilities most likely to be used as entry points by cybercriminals. Or, in case of discovery of some critical vulnerability that has been around for a long time, it becomes a reason to conduct a compromise assessment to check for the indicators of compromise. But that’s another story, so talk about it next time.

As years pass, there remain fewer companies, that do not require penetration testing. Every company with digital assets, especially online digital assets should consider doing a pentest. In many industries it has already become a regulatory requirement, for instance, in financial services, public services, healthcare, critical infrastructure, military & airspace. So, now it looks not like a question of whether your organization needs or doesn’t need the pentest, but rather why it hasn’t been done yet.

To make a decision easier for you, let’s reiterate pentest benefits. It helps:

• Test existing cybersecurity mechanisms (if any)
• Define possible attack surface and vectors
• Identify the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest threat to your digital assets
• Plan and execute the most efficient way of eliminating of the identified vulnerabilities
• As a result of the above, dramatically improve the general cybersecurity posture of your organization. 

However, penetesting is not without its limitations and peculiarities.

• Pentests are somewhat expensive, as a rule, though there are companies that offer excellent price/quality ratio 
• Undesired collateral damage might occur if the testing is conducted on productive systems (sometimes, it’s inevitable, especially in the manufacturing environment). 
• Penetration testing is an excellent exercise however, there are even more advanced forms of security assessments, such as breach and attack simulation, for instance.

However, none of the above drawbacks should be a point of concern. Penetration testing is a robust and very efficient measure to improve your cybersecurity posture, when done properly.