A Guide To Network Penetration Testing: Protect Your Site Against Hackers

Ethical hacking is the newest buzzword of the computer world. We all know that hacking is unethical. It is defined as unethically penetrating and extracting information from another website. In todays world when you are going online to store all data, hacking is proving to be a serious problem. Companies and organizations, irrespective of their sizes, therefore are now concerned about protecting their online data from hackers. Network penetration testing has therefore become important for Webmasters.

What is network penetration testing?

Hacking is not a new problem but over the time it has evolved to become more sophisticated. Unfortunately hackers have always stayed one step ahead of the anti-hacking devices available in the market.

Network penetration testing offers the invaluable baseline for designing the security system of a website. In network penetration testing, information is gathered about the organization's information system and security infrastructure and then the information is used to attack the website and breach its security. The information is then used to identify existing and potential security vulnerability of the website.

The test if often performed by a third party outside the organization where the security features of the website are challenged against all sorts of threats to make the security features foolproof.

Why should one perform network penetration testing?

Network penetration testing is done for various reasons, though the premier objective is to improve the security functionalities of the website and protect sensitive information from misuses. Following are the reasons of performing security penetration testing.

• To test the organization's responsiveness against security breaches.

• To test the damage management system.

• To help the organization evaluate its current security methods against hacking and identify gaps in it.

• To help evaluate the need of new security measures. It lets the management build a strong case for security upgrade.

• To help the organization meet the legal requirement for data security.

• To help the organization improve its e-governance. Keep the customer information, transactions, client information protected.

• To help organizations get cyber-security insurance which is gradually becoming important in the corporate world. Unbiased security audit conducted by third-party helps meet the requirements to obtain insurance.

What are the strategies employed in security penetration testing?

Network penetration testing industry is an evolving one and hence many new techniques are discovered everyday for testing the security lapses in a website. However, the most used methods are the following.

External Network penetration testing: When your testing partner would perform the security penetration testing for the site. It can be done with or without full revelation of the information system of the website.

Internal testing: The network penetration testing would be performed from within the technological environment of the organization. It is done to prevent security threats arising within the organization from internal members like- a disgruntled employee.

Blind testing: A real hacking attack is performed under the blind testing method of network penetration testing to find the flaws in the security system of the organization. It helps the organization identify the flawed areas which they need to cover from technically advanced hackers.

How would you choose your security penetration testing partner?

The process of choosing your network penetration testing partner isn't however easy. The foremost concern remains the trustworthiness of the organization since you may have to reveal most sensitive information of your organization to the firm. So, when you're required to choose a third party vendor to perform network penetration testing for your organization be careful only to select one which operates in the niche market of offering network penetration testing service to avoid conflict of interest.