Continuous Penetration Testing: Maintaining Your Security Defenses

by | Feb 9, 2023

Continuous Penetration Testing: Maintaining Your Security Defenses

Companies must recognize the urgent need to secure their software all the time. Successful cyberattacks happen continuously to individuals and organizations worldwide, and new tools, tactics, and variants emerge at breakneck speed.

To combat cyber threats, businesses must maintain a sensible security posture and eliminate weaknesses in their remote and on-premises IT environments. This is where continuous penetration testing comes in.

If you are curious about continuous penetration testing, continue reading to discover what it is and why all businesses should conduct one.

What is continuous penetration testing?

For starters, let’s start by defining continuous penetration. It is a new approach to penetration testing or pen testing that stimulates constant attacks on your IT infrastructure and web applications or web application.

Malicious hackers continuously target companies to exploit and discover new vulnerabilities.

Unlike a traditional penetration test that takes a year or two, continuous penetration testing cuts the time to discover and remediate any weakness that real-world cyber threat ethical hackers seek to exploit. The new approach combines demand-based testing with continuous monitoring to provide constant visibility of a company’s security posture.

Here are the main features required for continuous testing:

• Zero false positives and manual penetration: You need a service provider that offers vetted manual pen tests and vulnerability assessments done by security experts.
• Ci/cd pipeline integration: It makes it possible to update and launch web and mobile applications at a high pace.

Why perform continuous penetration testing?

Vulnerabilities can lead to the risk of losing sensitive data and interrupting enterprise operations. Here are six benefits of continuous penetration testing.

  • Lower costs
  • Adhere to compliance
  • Enhanced security expertise
  • Increased efficiency
  • Boosting your overall security posture
  • Increased ROI

1. Lower costs

Allowing companies to discover and address security issues on continuous, ongoing penetration tests or pen tests makes managing security costs easier.

Reducing the time spent on unpredicted work ensures that your Information Technology (IT) operations run cost-effectively and more efficiently.

Put simply, continuous vulnerability scanning reduces your exposure to attacks, reducing the cost of cyber security.

2. Improved security compliance

Businesses involved in data management, transmission, and storage are usually required to comply with certain industry standards. These standards include ISO\IEC 27000, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR:

Continuous penetration testing can assist organizations in achieving this by offering specific and up-to-date evidence at a particular point in time.

3. Enhanced security expertise

A pen tester has a strong knowledge of a multi-faceted system into which they do authorized hacking. The penetration testers can explore the IT environment internally and externally, offering them knowledge of the systems.

Additionally, increased relationships between outsourced experts and in-house teams can improve internal security expertise.

4. Increased efficiency

With this new approach to penetration testing, businesses running around enhanced datasets don’t need to worry about unexpected security issues. A standard pen test goes along with improving systematic identification of remediation period, data trends, and lowered redundancies in security.

5. Boosting your overall security posture

When assessments are performed constantly, companies can make timely asset discoveries to make up their attack surface.

A pen testers scan through each attack surface, including physical surfaces, social engineering, artificial, and digital surfaces, to decide on the penetration test type to adopt. That gives them a chance to check any vulnerability in the assets. Hackers doing the tests instantly imitate new threats in their environment.

6. Increased ROI (Return on Investment)

Monitoring your cybersecurity Return on Investment via traditional pen test is almost impossible.

But it is possible with continuous pen testing because of the reporting tools and routine metrics. The metrics include data trends, historical data, and cost-benefit analysis.

Continuous Penetration Testing

Imagine a penetrating tool integrated with your CI\CD pipeline; begin a scan whenever you launch an update or push new code. That is security testing’s future, and we all must embrace it.

There are numerous benefits of continuous security. It lets you stay ahead of the curve, find weaknesses early, and get continuous feedback. It also allows you to automate the process, from generating reports to scheduling tests.

So if you are looking for a great way to protect your organization from existing and new cybercrimes, switch to continuous web application security assurance.

Ella Crawford
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