Most in-house security experts have become increasingly aware of the value of penetration testing in validating the credibility of an organization’s security posture.
However, basic penetration tests just show your cyber security status at one moment. The reality of modern IT frameworks is that periodic security checks are not sufficient to assure secure technological environments. Continuous penetration testing keeps your cyber infrastructure secure by regularly updating you on real-time vulnerabilities.
This post will cover the benefits of continuous penetration testing.
How Penetration Testing Works
Also known as pen testing or ethical hacking, penetration testing is an organized attack to find vulnerabilities in a target IT system. Security experts, who have the right experience, tools, and techniques, conduct pen tests to find system weaknesses.
A pen tester simulates various cyber attacks to test a system’s resistance to different threat levels. For example, a social engineering pen test mimics the strategies and actions that a social hacker can explore to breach a computer system.
A penetration tester scans through every attack surface, including digital, artificial, social engineering, and physical surfaces, to decide on the type of penetration test to adopt.
For organizations operating in cloud-based environments, understanding the full scope of what an attacker can see is especially critical. SaaS platforms introduce a constantly shifting set of assets — APIs, third-party integrations, user access points — that expand and change faster than traditional infrastructure. A structured approach to attack surface management for SaaS environments helps security teams maintain an accurate, up-to-date inventory of every potential entry point, ensuring that nothing falls outside the scope of assessment. Without that visibility, even the most thorough penetration test may miss newly exposed vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
Continuous security testing proactively assesses and fixes security loopholes.
Benefits of Continuous Penetration Testing
A single vulnerability can disrupt business and risk losing sensitive data.
Here are 8 primary reasons why you must adopt continuous security assessments as a measure of effective security controls over your IT infrastructure.
• Gain Better Representation of Real-World Cyber Environment
Traditional vulnerability assessments are run on a point-in-time basis. However, real-world cyber threats are extremely dynamic for a periodic vulnerability assessment to capture. Continuous pen tests provide ethical hackers with real-time cyber events as they happen. Potential and ongoing attacks are also detected in real-time.
• Prevention of Unexpected Security Breaches
The red team, your unit of pen test specialists, is well-versed in the tricks and tactics of cyber attackers. With penetration tests running regularly, the team can identify new vulnerabilities as they occur. This way, risks are prioritized and remediation of weaknesses implemented to prevent unexpected breaches.
• Improved Security Compliance
Organizations involved in the storage, transmission, and management of data are required to comply with specified industry standards. Such standards include GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO/IEC 27000.
Continuous penetration testing ensures that an organization meets current standards.
• Reduction of Operational Costs
An attacker infiltrating an organization’s networks and web apps can lead to significant financial losses. This is because of the financial implication that comes with system downtimes, data loss, and remediation process.
Continuous vulnerability scanning mitigates your exposure to cyber attacks, lowering the overall cost of cyber security.
• Improved Efficiency
With continuous penetration testing, companies operating around increased datasets do not have to worry about unpredictable security issues. Standard pen tests go a long way in enhancing systematic identification of data trends, remediation period, and reduced redundancies in cybersecurity.
• Increased Security Expertise
Pen testers have a robust knowledge of multi-faceted systems into which they perform authorized hacking. These experts can explore your IT environment externally and internally, providing them with in-depth knowledge of your systems.
Consequently, enhanced relationships between an in-house security team and outsourced penetration testers can increase internal cybersecurity expertise.
• Enhanced Return on Investment (ROI)
Cybersecurity ROI is the financial gains you generate against the amount of money invested in cyber security processes and resources.
Generally, it is almost impossible to monitor your cybersecurity ROI through traditional pen testing. This is because basic pen tests are periodic, leaving room for more vulnerabilities over the rest of the unassessed period.
Continuous pen testing provides organizations with clear insights into how their spending prevents potential attacks. This is made possible through routine metrics and reporting tools that come with continuous pen tests. Such metrics include historical data, data trends, cost-benefit analysis, and average remediation period.
• Up-to-Date Security Reporting
Security updates produced by periodic pen tests are only relevant to specified points in time. The cyberspace is ever-evolving, and continuous penetration testing is the only way to get real-time, up-to-date security insights.
