Hackers/Scammers are becoming one of the major threats to the internet and to your application. They always look for vulnerable applications, websites around the internet and inject their malware codes to gain the access of the system that is approachable to infect. It is very important to test your applications, websites against cyber attacks in order to ensure your organization data in a safe place. Security testing is a type of Software testing that identifies vulnerabilities, risks, threats in a software application and prevents malicious, cyber attacks from intruders. The main purpose of security tests is to predict possible loopholes, backdoors and weaknesses of the software system in order to protect it against loss of information, revenue, repute of the Organization. In this article, we are going to discuss the various types of security testing that you can perform for your websites, applications to safeguard them from such threats. The below are the fundamentals techniques to carry out the penetration or security testing for your website or application.
- Vulnerability scanning.
Vulnerability scanning is the top most technique that is performed to assess and identify the security loopholes on your application. This testing will help to reduce the probability of a successful hacking attempt that can be made on your software. It includes various workarounds to verify the integrity of application, strength of the passwords, databases and to assess the security of the application configuration files.
- Security scanning.
During this process, a Cybersecurity engineer will execute a tool, a scan software or command to scan the security of a site, network, application or database system in order to to check for the possible security risks associated with your system or application. At ORYON, our administrators regularly perform the security scanning for all our servers in a timely manner. Generally, the scanning process can be either manual or automated.
- Security auditing.
Security auditing is a list of testing processes that evaluate your application on how well it performs on a set of established, attempt preventing criteria. This security audit is often used to comply with the predefined regulatory guidelines designed to secure the confidentiality of user information.
- Penetration testing.
A penetration test is the simulated, planned cyber attack that the administrator will proceed against your application to check for its vulnerabilities. This will give an insight regarding the available backdoors for a hacker might use to break in. Penetration testing is used to improve the Web Application Firewall (WAF) for your server using the result taken from the processes like cross-site scripting, exploitable backdoors, SQL injections, etc,.
- Risk assessment.
Risk assessment provides a clear insight of the various risks associated with your application. Administrators used to categorize them in the low, medium and high impact risk order. It also recommends the solutions and measures to mitigate all these levels of risks, starting with the most high impact type of risks.
- Ethical hacking.
Ethical hacking is the advanced practice manipulated by the certified administrator of intruding into your application with the legal intention to identify the weaknesses of the system. Ethical hackers or certified administrators may use the same tools and methods which are used by malicious (black hat) hackers but with the permission of the authorized owner. The utmost goal of this activity is to defend the systems from attacks by malicious hackers.
- Posture assessment.
Using the details collected from all scanning and assessment procedures, a posture assessment will be performed. This kind of assessment can be useful for any organization to identify where they stand now, what the security/protection features are missing and what must be done to increase the security level of the application.