Penetration-Testing-as-a-Service: An Essential Component of the Cybersecurity Toolkit
The benefits of digital transformation are obvious. For many businesses, it is impossible to imagine working without the flexibility afforded by widespread multi-cloud computing. Meanwhile, AI is facilitating the ingestion and synthesis of data on an unprecedented scale, allowing many businesses to speed up innovation and maximize profit. But using these innovations without accounting for — and defending against — the potential risks would be a grave error.
Business operations have widely moved to the cloud, potentially exposing sensitive digital infrastructure. This has been a necessary process, but it has left virtually every organization dangerously exposed. It is no surprise that ransomware, insider threats, data exfiltration, exposed cloud databases and more have increased over the last few years: The simple fact is that much more of the business world now exists in the cloud, which means much more of it is now vulnerable. Ultimately, in the rush to reap the spoils of the digital revolution, many businesses have neglected this fact — and more than a few have paid the price.
Observing the high-profile attacks of the last year, many businesses across industries are thinking more deeply about cybersecurity. Faced with the reality that they cannot be everywhere and know everything, they have opened themselves up to scalable solutions that they may have ignored or didn’t exist, a decade earlier. And of those solutions, few have moved towards the mainstream of cybersecurity as definitively as penetration-testing-as-a-service (PTaaS)—and with good reason.
PTaaS involves outsourcing penetration testing activities to a trusted third-party service provider, saving busy internal teams valuable time and offering an objective outsider’s perspective of their systems. With PTaaS, security researchers follow structured and consistent methodologies to simulate real-world attacks during a time-bound engagement focused on a system, network, or application to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses. This proactive approach helps businesses identify and address potential security issues before malicious actors can exploit them.
How to Build an Effective Pentesting Strategy
Ensuring data is safeguarded and threats are mitigated and are not one-off tasks. Achieving this requires continuous security assessments that are adaptable as security risks, from an adversarial perspective, are intended to thwart security teams. The speed at which cybercriminals vary their tactics can make best practices obsolete within weeks, which is why organizations need to partner with a broad range of security researchers, especially those with a strong background in ethical hacking.
By taking on the mindset of a malicious actor, penetration testing teams make controlled and coordinated attempts to break into assets defined by the customer. Their deep understanding of how attackers hunt for vulnerabilities based on technology stack composition, things like programming languages and network protocols, allows them to uncover vulnerabilities and help organizations fix them.
There are three key components of any modern, effective PTaaS strategy with ethical hacker testing teams:
1) Identify your most vulnerable assets. In an ideal world, every asset would be analyzed for weaknesses all the time. In practice, this is unfeasible. To most effectively allocate limited resources, businesses need to inventory and rank their assets from most to least sensitive. In other words: Which company assets would cause the most damage if a bad actor got ahold of them? Typically, this will include information like proprietary IP, competitive and legal information and personally identifiable information (PII).
2) Don’t just pentest occasionally. Some businesses tend to look at pentests like fire drills — i.e., very occasional chores to take care of, mostly for compliance reasons. This is a deeply flawed stance. Pentesting infrequently is only marginally more effective than never pentesting at all. Companies need to pentest often, and they need to partner with a pentest provider that can start a test in days, as opposed to weeks. This is a clear benefit of a PTaaS solution over traditional pentesting as the provider can offer instant visibility into what they discover. This allows businesses to move at speed and address pressing security flaws quickly.
3) Let your customers know that you pentest frequently. Especially in the B2B sector, a robust, multi-pronged cybersecurity strategy builds trust and can be an essential strategic differentiator for a business. This means that once you start routinely pentesting, you should let that fact be known — it can prove invaluable in highly competitive industries (and might even help to deter attackers).
At a time when IT teams are chronically understaffed, investing in PTaaS can shoulder some of the burden of keeping businesses safe. Hundreds of thousands of registered testers are available to businesses at any given time, crowdsourced from ethical hacking providers. The fresh eyes they bring to each encounter — as well as their wide variety of skill sets — can serve as a roadmap for the best possible security protocols, while helping to cultivate the kind of robust and agile cybersecurity strategy that no business today can do without.
