Cyber Security Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking and Vulnerability Scanning – 3 ways to pressure test your IT/OT systems

Cyber Security Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking/Red Teaming are crucial tools in your organisation’s cyber security arsenal. Regardless of the cyber security processes and tools your organisation has in place to monitor and protect your environment, ongoing system testing helps your organisation to proactively identify and mitigate security weaknesses. In this article we’ll dive into the important reasons to pressure-test your system, and explain the core differences between Cyber Security Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking (Red Teaming) and Vulnerability Scanning. Testing your system is one of the most powerful and effective ways to understand and improve your organisation’s security posture in the face of evolving cyber threats.

1. Identifying Vulnerabilities: By simulating real-world attacks, testers can find vulnerabilities that may otherwise go unnoticed, allowing you to proactively address issues discovered through testing.
2. Risk Assessment and Prioritisation: Testing provides important insights into the actual risk level of your organisation’s digital or OT assets. By understanding the potential impact of successful attacks, your organisation can prioritise and focus efforts and allocate resources effectively to mitigate the most critical risks.
3. Verifying Security Measures: Let’s assume you have invested significant resources in security measures such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and access controls. Without testing, your organisation won’t know if these security measures are working effectively and adequately protecting its assets.
4. Incident Response Preparedness: You can gain valuable insights into your organisation’s incident response capabilities by simulating cyber-attacks, identifying areas where the response process can be improved and ensuring your organisation is better prepared to effectively handle security incidents.
5. Compliance Requirements: Regular system testing is now commonly mandated by customers and industry bodies and as part of their compliance requirements. Meeting these standards is important to demonstrate due diligence in protecting personal information and other sensitive data and systems.
6. Cost Savings: An up-front investment in system testing will enable your organisation to find and fix vulnerabilities before they are exploited by threat actors, potentially saving your organisation from costly legal actions, fines, and recovery efforts, not to mention reputational damage and loss of business.

Now that you know all of the reasons your organisation needs to engage in ongoing system testing, what type of testing should you do?

Vulnerability Scanning
Vulnerability scanning uses software to identify if your organisation’s systems and applications have potential known security vulnerabilities. Automated vulnerability scanning tests the target attack surface in your organisation utilising a database of known vulnerabilities. The key limitation is that vulnerability scanning software can only identify vulnerabilities it has signatures for, such as configuration issues, incomplete or incorrect deployment of security tools, inadequate patching, out-of-date software, etc. Vulnerability scanning cannot find unknown vulnerabilities.

So, whilst vulnerability scanning has some benefits, it should only ever be viewed as a starting point for your organisation.

Penetration Testing
Cyber Security Penetration Testing, often abbreviated as “pen testing,” involved authorised cyber security professionals simulating real-world cyber-attacks on your organisation’s systems, networks, or applications to identify potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Experienced pen testers will use a combination of automated vulnerability scanning technologies and a variety of tactics and techniques, including custom written exploits, to try to gain access to your critical assets (black box pen testing) and then move laterally through your system or different applications to achieve the objectives depending on the agreed testing scope, which could include access to information, obtaining control of systems, obtaining administrative privileges.

After testing is complete, you will receive a report that includes an executive summary of the test parameters along with vulnerability classification documents and suggestions for remediation. The Penetration Testing process typically a number of steps – but we’ll leave that for a different blog.

Ethical Hacking/Red-Teaming
As with Pen testing, ethical hacking identifies vulnerabilities in an organisation’s IT environments and works to prevent different types of cyber-attacks. However, whilst Penetration Testing assesses the security of a specific aspect of your organisation’s systems based on an outlined scope, ethical hackers carry out different types of cyber-attacks on your organisation’s entire system using multiple attack vectors without being restricted by a scope document.

Ethical hackers need detailed knowledge of threat actor TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) to imitate a threat actor’s approach to conducting a cyber-attack. Ethical hackers can and do use Cyber Security Penetration Testing as one of their many tools for diagnosing security issues in your organisation’s security system, however, the main focus is on building and improving your organisation’s information security system.

Reach out to CyBiz to understand which combination of testing is best for your organisation. Our team comprises individuals who are more than just security experts, but are genuine (ethical) hackers knowledgeable and experienced in the “dark arts” of cyber-attacks such as endpoint protection bypass techniques, RFID cloning, security alarm system bypass, and more.

Cyber Security Risk Assessment and Penetration Testing (cybiz.au)