Automated penetration testing is a great way to improve your company’s cyber security. It’s so convenient that you can conduct it at night or on the weekends. So you won’t have to take the time out of your day for this necessary task. In this blog, we will discuss at length automated penetration tests.
What is Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing is a popular way to find security holes in your company’s network. Pentesting gives the tester information on how easy it is for a malicious hacker to gain access to critical data or systems within an organization. Penetration testing also gives the tester information on the kind of damage that results from a security breach.
What Is Automated Penetration Testing
Automated penetration testing (APT) is the process of automatically submitting attack vectors to an organization’s cybersecurity defenses in order to find any vulnerabilities. APT has become more popular because you can conduct it on a large scale at a relatively low cost.
What’s The Difference Between Manual And Automated Pen Tests?
When it comes down to assessing a company’s cyber security defenses, there are two types that companies might choose from, manual penetration tests and automated penetration tests.
Manual Penetration Testing
In a manual penetration test, the tester has to find vulnerabilities and exploit them by hand. This can be time-consuming as testers have to manually review code. Manual pen testing is also more expensive because it requires additional manpower for each test. On top of this, there are ethical considerations with carrying out this type of assessment on live networks. In this case, data could potentially be lost or damaged if exploited properly.
Automated Penetrating Tests
Automated security assessments work differently than manual ones in several ways. This makes them far superior when assessing an organization’s cyber defenses against intrusion attempts from malicious attackers who want access to confidential information stored within those organizations. These pentests will help you find vulnerabilities in automated ways.
Automated Penetration Testing Tools
In automated penetration testing tools, the security testers can use automated scanners to check for vulnerabilities in a network. These automated scanners are also known as “security auditing” or “penetration-testing products”.
- They typically take information from an existing vulnerability database and then use this information to find vulnerabilities in the system. Examples of vulnerability databases such as:
- Vulners Database (previously HP OpenVAS)
- NIST National Vulnerability Database
- OSVDB – Open Source Vulnerability Databases
- The Exploit DB
In automated penetration testing tools, automated scanners can check for several different types of security issues such as SQL Injection, Cross-site Scripting (XSS), Local/Remote File Inclusion, etc., these automated scanners are available as “standalone” apps or as part of a larger framework that may include other useful features and development libraries.
Some popular examples of automated penetration testing tools include – Burp Suite, WPscan, Nmap, etc.
You have to use these automated scanners with existing web applications. They can also be customized for special purposes like finding vulnerabilities in third-party websites before being integrated into your website via APIs from their respective owners.
The Benefits Of Using Automated Penetration Testing Tools
- Increase the speed of your penetration test by around 100 times (it takes minutes instead of months)
- Reduce costs dramatically as automated tools. You can set them up yourself and run them at night or on weekends
- Find more issues than you would uncover through manual testing because automated tools work with precision, accuracy, and thoroughness.
- when it comes down to critical systems that contain sensitive data like financial records or healthcare information which needs to be secured properly under HIPAA regulations.
Can You Replace Humans With An Automated Pen Testing Solution?
The answer is yes but not entirely for two reasons:
Automated pen-testing solutions are not perfect and they produce some false positives which can be time-consuming to address. This is especially true when looking at patches that were recently released by vendors as automated tools might not recognize these new changes or updates made to the system’s software.
It’s always best practice to follow up on automated findings with human verification just in case something was missed, thereby ensuring all critical issues have been addressed before moving onto the next phase of your penetration test plan.
Automated pen tests help you find known vulnerabilities but they cannot replicate a real attack carried out by advanced persistent threats (APTs) who use zero-day exploits. What this means is that automated security assessments will pick up on flaws using publicly available knowledge. If you are looking for a comprehensive server security audit, please check the linked guide for complete testing.
However, it is not capable of finding brand new flaws in software and applications that might be used to exploit the most sensitive systems within your organization.
Conclusion
Automated penetration testing is a cost-effective and efficient way to identify vulnerabilities in your network. You can set it up with just a few clicks, then add or remove certain modules as you need them. In this blog post, we included the basics of automated penetration testing so that when people ask what’s possible for their business.
https://ventsmagazine.com/2021/09/26/basics-of-automated-penetration-testing-an-introduction/