What is Penetration Testing?
You can find the essence of technology everywhere. Today , as businesses increase their dependency on information technology, including cloud IOT devices, mobile devices, social media, the Cyber risk continues to rise at an alarming rate every day. You hear about Cyber Hackers attacking into computer systems servers stealing everything from passwords to financial information.
But the good news is that there is a way a company can find out security weaknesses and loopholes which are present in computer systems, networks and applications before the cyber criminals can; this can be accomplished through an iterative process known as penetration testing or simply known as pen test. So, “Penetration testing in simple terms is an art of finding vulnerabilities and digging deep to find out how much a target can be compromised in case of a legitimate attack”. But how are they doing that? The answer is simple, Cyber criminals generally make use of loopholes present in computer systems networks and applications to get what they want. These vulnerabilities could be due to multiple reasons.
Reasons of Vulnerabilities
Let’s take a look at a few of these vulnerabilities. Flaws and the design of hardware and software can put business critical data at risk of exposure. If the system is poorly configured, then it can introduce loop holes through which attackers can enter into the system and steal the information in a matter of seconds. Or you could be using an unsecured network making it easy for the cyber criminals to attack. The more complex the architecture of a computer system is, the more chances your system is being attacked. Often human errors like improperly sensitive documents, coding errors, insider threads, sharing passwords etc., can lead to security breaches as well.
