A single incident or cyber attack can have severe financial repercussions in today’s increasingly complex cyber security landscape. Businesses of all sizes are investing in cyber security tools and solutions to safeguard their data and defend against threats, but how can they evaluate the effectiveness of these measures? Despite investments in cyber security, a business could still harbour hidden vulnerabilities that cyber criminals can exploit.
The solution? Pentesting.
What is Pentesting?
Pentesting, also known as penetration testing, is a form of ethical hacking that actively exploits vulnerabilities in a network system to simulate a real-world attack. This process assesses security defences and uncovers potential weaknesses.
Pentesting serves as a proactive measure in addressing hidden vulnerabilities, playing a vital role in enhancing a business’ overall cyber security resilience.
What is Automated Pentesting?
Traditionally, businesses would need to assemble a large IT team to plan, schedule, and conduct pentesting, a time-consuming, expensive, and complicated process.
Automated pentesting revolutionises this approach by enabling businesses to launch a full-scale penetration test with just a click of a button. This empowers businesses to tap into the expertise of seasoned penetration testers on demand. Automated pentesting delivers real-time notifications and progress updates, with the capability to generate a comprehensive report by the week’s end.
What Does a Pentest Report Include?
A pentest report typically includes an executive summary, a technical report and a vulnerability report. These documents provide clear insights into the risks present in the organisation’s environment and assist in identifying the areas that should be prioritised for remediation. Additional documentation can include details on methodology, comparisons against previous reports, risk assessments, and security recommendations.
Benefits of Automated Pentesting
Automated pentesting strengthens a business’ cyber security stance by continuously and comprehensively assessing network defences, ensuring increased resilience against evolving threats.
Here are ten ways your business benefits when you implement automated pentesting:
- Cost-Effective Security Assurance
Automated pentesting offers high value at a reduced cost compared to traditional assessments, making pentesting accessible to SMBs that couldn’t afford it before. By reducing labour costs, accelerating testing processes and providing continuous monitoring to prevent costly cyber security incidents, automated pentesting allows you to make significant savings in the long run. These savings can then be invested into strengthening other aspects of your security strategy, such as mitigating issues uncovered during the assessment phase.
- Time Efficiency and Business Continuity
Timely identification of vulnerabilities is critical to prevent expensive incidents. Automated pentesting optimises efficiency, allowing businesses to assess their security posture swiftly. Automated pentesting can assess at any time, as often as needed, with just the click of a button.
- Regulatory Compliance and Risk Management
Meeting compliance is crucial, and automated pentesting makes meeting security assessment standards easy, covering both general requirements and specific regulations. As a robust risk management tool, it efficiently addresses vulnerabilities, reducing the potential for fines, safeguarding reputation, and fostering customer trust.
- Streamlined Cyber Security
Automation simplifies security efforts for SMBs. Unlike traditional penetration testing which involves lengthy planning and waiting for reports, automated pentesting offers quick implementation and swift results. This agility allows businesses to address vulnerabilities promptly, minimising downtime and enhancing security resilience.
- Continuous Security
Constrained by time and cost factors, traditional pentesting often limits businesses to conducting only a few assessments each year. Automated pentesting enables ongoing assessments, provides real-time risk monitoring, and addresses evolving threats.
- Improved Password Management
Numerous SMBs face vulnerability to password-based attacks due to inadequate password management strategies. Automated pentesting can identify and exploit weak or compromised credentials within your network, highlighting areas for improvement in your password management approach.
- Validation of Threat Detection Capabilities
Regular assessments of security solutions are crucial for SMBs to optimise cyber security. Automated pentesting simulates real-world cyber attacks, evaluating the effectiveness of security solutions like antivirus, intrusion detection systems, firewalls, and log management software in detecting and blocking malicious activity on the network. This validation process provides reassurance, affirming that your cyber security solutions are robust.
- Enhanced Network Segmentation
Automated pentesting assessments pinpoint network segmentation weaknesses by simulating lateral movement across the internal network, highlighting any vulnerabilities to prevent unauthorised access. Continuous pentesting enables businesses to monitor cyber security during network changes, ensuring the ongoing validation of network security measures.
- Optimised Configuration Management
Automated pentesting can expose weaknesses in configured services, allowing for adjustments to mitigate risks. Securing services goes beyond patching; it depends on proper configuration to fend off cyber threats, as threat actors often exploit misconfigurations. Leveraging ethical hacking techniques, automated pentesting consistently identifies misconfiguration-related vulnerabilities for remediation.
- Overcome Patch Fatigue
Each year, the discovery of new software and hardware vulnerabilities underscores the importance of implementing critical updates across all services. Automated pentesting enhances patch management strategies by identifying and prioritising known vulnerabilities for patching in your environment.
How Ever Nimble Can Help
At Ever Nimble, our award-winning team of experts provide honest and intelligent advice to enhance your cyber security resilience and help your business thrive.
Our PenTesting service allows our cyber security experts to find hidden vulnerabilities, evaluate their impact on your business if exploited, provide actionable data essential to implement effective change, and assist with risk remediation.
Ready to fortify your cyber defences with a team of cyber experts? Learn even more about our PenTesting service here, or get in touch with our team of cyber security experts here.
