Penetration Testing: Realise your resilience

Penetration Testing sometimes referred to as ethical hacking, when performed correctly can play an important part in any organisation’s cyber security strategy. Criminals and hackers continually develop more sophisticated methods to exploit vulnerabilities and gain access to private property. It is paramount to have a strong security posture to combat malicious activities and minimise risks, from both outside and in. The quality of Penetration Testing effectiveness can differ and depends on the skills, experience, approach, and the tester’s tools.

What does Penetration Testing do?

Created over the past two decades, Penetration Testing serves a wide range of objectives and areas which need to be protected by simulating the same methods of attack that a real threat actor would use. Implementing a testing regime can be invaluable to assess the security of the processes, technology, and people who underpin your critical business operations.

The benefits of including Penetration Testing in your cyber security strategy are:

Protect your organisation and your digital assets: Identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities across your applications, business systems, processes, and websites before they can be attacked and exploited by criminals.

Protect sensitive data:  Personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, intellectual property and trade secrets are among the most valuable assets your organisation possesses and they are a highly prized target for attackers. As such they are heavily protected by law and regulations. Any data breach can lead to heavy fines, reputational damage and a loss of trust.

Save your organisation money: Cyber security is increasingly seen as a business enabler with a demonstrable return on investment. The costs of testing, and security solutions, can be offset against the cost of responding to and the remediation of an incident, as well as any potential fines.

Safeguard your organisation’s reputation: Cyber incidents can fundamentally harm an organisation’s ability to operate by undermining consumer trust in its products, solutions, as well as disrupting the availability of critical services. A major motivation for investment in penetration testing is to preserve trust by avoiding high-profile incidents.

Support your IT teams: In the field of cyber security there is a severe shortage of skilled workers. Working with an independent partner, like Trustmarque, to deliver your Penetration Testing cannot only save you time and money but can also work alongside your teams and bring the knowledge and expertise of dedicated cyber security professionals.

Using penetration testing effectively: Advice from NCSC

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), gives advice on getting the most from penetration testing and states that a penetration test can only validate that your organisation’s IT systems are not vulnerable to known issues on the day of the test. They also warn against lapses in the testing schedule as it can allow weaknesses and vulnerabilities to go undetected for long periods of time, leaving your organisation open to exploitation and damaging consequences.

The NCSC also suggests that “the quality of a penetration test is closely linked to the abilities of the penetration testers involved” and therefore any third-party penetration tests should only be performed by qualified and experienced individuals.

“The NCSC recommends that Her Majesty’s Government organisations use testers and companies which are part of the CHECK scheme. Non-governmental organisations should use teams qualified under one of these certification schemes: CREST, Tiger scheme, Cyber Scheme.”

Realise your resilience

Trustmarque Penetration Testing Services are consultant-led security assessments that seek out security vulnerabilities in your systems, networks, or applications that an attacker could exploit. We have a comprehensive range of testing services to meet any situation from wireless to network, web applications to active directory, and many more.

Our penetration testing services are CREST, NCSC CHECK, and ISO 27001 certified and are suitable for PCI-DSS Security Testing, Public Services Network (PSN) Code of Connection Testing for Public Sector, or HSCN/N3 Testing for healthcare.