Here at HTG we are often asked about the differences between penetration testing and vulnerability testing (sometimes referred to as vulnerability scanning). In this piece we are going to take a look at both methods of assessing an organisation’s security posture, and show how each one can help you make sure your business is fully protected against malicious attack.
What is Penetration Testing?
This is often carried out by ethical hackers and experienced DevOps engineers, who set to work testing and determining possible security gaps in an organisation’s security architecture. It’s also a form of ethical hacking deployed to fully understand security vulnerabilities and ways to remove them from a security environment.
Most tests are done through the simulation of cyber-attacks on organisational systems to determine how they would react in the face of a cyber-attack.
Although penetration testing – or pen testing as we cyber security experts call it - relies on automation to execute testing on network and application components, it still requires a great deal of manual checking to ensure that the check is thorough and without any traces of false positives in the results. That’s why seasoned testers usually conduct penetration testing without an over-reliance on automation tools to detect possible gaps in network security.
Testers go beyond identifying security gaps, launching an exploitation process and a variety of hacking techniques and pen testing tools to determine the strength of your security configurations and find out what happens to a security setup when it comes under attack.
One of the key features of penetration testing is its preventive undertone. Testers aim to figure out vulnerabilities, and work out how to ensure that the weaknesses found in your networks are fixed before the hackers find them, so you avoid being exploited by those who wish your organisation harm.
Vulnerability Testing
The definition of vulnerability testing is to detect security issues on your organisation’s networks, computers, and wider cultural environment.
This is a security management strategy used to typically identify and report vulnerabilities in web applications, servers and firewalls. The main goal is to help detect, classify and report weaknesses in your internal and external networks, computers, IP addresses, and communication equipment.
The more comprehensive scans also include wider cultural areas of a business, such as company policies, training, and user activity. This is a broader test of business resilience that goes beyond the technical layer of a scan.
A typical vulnerability assessment uses vulnerability scanning tools to automate the process of scanning the components mentioned above, providing a detailed report on how to resolve the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Some scans also include business-aligned reporting, which makes them a valuable tool to support proposals for an increase in the IT budget.
Vulnerability testing covers two areas: external and internal. As it says on the tin, an external scan checks for loopholes in your external systems and networks, and often more importantly it looks at areas such as user activity, training and policies. An internal scan checks your internal network endpoints for possible gaps in the security configurations.
People often ask us which is best - penetration testing or vulnerability scanning - but it’s not a choice of either/or. Used together, the combined results of a penetration test and a vulnerability test can reflect the security posture of your entire organisation, highlighting any issued that need addressing, and giving you peace of mind that there are no hidden gaps that could spell trouble in the future.
You've worked hard to make your business successful – talk to us about how we can help you make sure it’s protected.
Share
