How Powerful is the Penetration Testing Software?

In today’s condition of business insecurity, businesses must take every possible precaution to defend themselves from security breaches and risks. The security attacks can cause significant loss or damage to brands, people, profits, and reputation.

That’s why organizations are increasingly placing reliable and resilient security systems with the intent to guard against attacks on their physical and information security.

However, how can you be sure your security systems are robust and effective? Well, this where penetration testing, including both manual pen-testing and penetration testing software comes into the equation.

What is the Purpose of Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing is a pre-defined set of procedures used to identify any unknown weakness in the IT infrastructure of a corporation or a business. It involves attempts to exploit vulnerabilities, which may exist in services and application flaws, operating systems, risky end-user behavior, or improper configurations with the intent to validate the efficacy of protection mechanisms and end-user observation to security policies.

Regular pen-testing will ensure your defensive mechanisms provide adequate protection against potential and real threats. It will tell you whether your security systems are functioning as intended. Pen-testing is vital for every business as it helps to

• Identify & Prioritize Security Risks
• Leverage a proactive defense approach
• Intelligently manage vulnerabilities
• Increase confidence in your security system
• Discover the strength of existing security programs
• Meet Regulatory Requirements

How Penetration Testing is Performed?

Penetration testing is generally performed using the manual as well as automated technologies to compromise endpoints, wireless networks, servers, mobile devices, network devices, and other points of exposure.

In case any vulnerabilities are exploited in a certain system, the pen-testers, further attempt to compromise the exploited system to launch successive exploits to examine the depth of the vulnerability. The detailed analysis of the successfully exploited vulnerabilities through pen-testing is aggregated and presented to your network and IT team to help them make conclusions and prioritize the remediation actions.

What is Penetration Testing Software?

Attackers today are using tools to make their security breach attempts successful. The same applies to pen testers as well. Pen-testing tools are typically used as part of penetration testing to automate certain tasks to enhance testing efficiency and uncover vulnerabilities, which might be hard to detect with manual testing techniques alone. Some software is commercial, while others are open source. The two common types of pen-testing tools are

• Static Analysis tools
• Dynamic Analysis tools

Some of these tools are used to replicate the attacks that threat actors do while others are bundled with stronger features with the end goal of examining security vulnerabilities without disturbing production environments as well as prioritizing remediation action.

Penetration testing is quite a complex and sophisticated task. It could take hours or even days if it all needs to be completed by hand. Thus, the requirement for automated penetration testing tools arises to carry out certain tests efficiently and quickly.

An easier way to carry out pen-testing is to use automated testing tools that will carry out some of the penetration testing steps with minimal human intervention or employ wizards to assist you.

Security teams of most organizations are turning to cloud-based pen-testing tools to advance their in-house security programs via strategic automation. Simple, reliable, centralized, and efficient are the major features of automated penetration testing software that attracted many businesses.

Types of Tools Used in Successful Penetration Testing

The pen-testing software can be broken into the following categories:

• Port Scanners – Port scanners take place in the first phase of a pen-testing. This tool enables you to detect all network entry points open on a given system.
• Vulnerability Scanner – An automatic tool designed to assess systems, applications, or networks for known vulnerabilities. This tool can take part in a standalone assessment or a continuous complete security monitoring approach.
• Application Scanner – This tool examines the security weaknesses that reside in web applications. The web application scanner scans apps against cookie manipulations, memory buffer overruns, SQL injections, XSS, and more.
• Web Application Assessment Proxy – This tool sits between the targeted web server and the web browser of the pen-tester to closely examine all the data and information flow between the two.

How Powerful is the Penetration Testing Software?

1. Validates which vulnerabilities pose an actual risk

Pen-testing software finds vulnerabilities and validates whether those vulnerabilities pose a severe threat, saving you more time as well as resources. Automated testing tools attempt to exploit discovered vulnerabilities with real-time attack scenarios, offering a helpful proof point about whether the weakness is exploitable or not.

2. Save more time through automation

You can successfully automate lots of pen-testing tasks without losing effectiveness. These tools come up with robust automation capabilities. The more steps you automate, the more your security team focuses on core tasks that require their attention. This is a key benefit of buying a paid automated penetration testing software against a free or an open-source tool. Automation is where you will obtain the greatest efficiency as well as cost savings.

3. Mirror real-world attacks

The testing tools can simulate the same attacks that the attacker does. Penetration testing tools will test your security mechanisms the same way, a real-world hacker might do by using techniques and exploits utilized by the actual attacker to check whether you’ve placed your defense through their paces.

4. Improves results with robust dashboard and reporting

The dashboard of automated penetration testing tools offers a quick overview of the result. It displays a graphical summary of the discovered weaknesses, scan activity, and a list of latest scans. Further, the vendors strive hard to make the report section of the tool more friendly and human-readable form as possible. Most tools’ report starts with a visual summary of the result. They also include the findings section and details about discovered vulnerabilities like description, risk score, and recommendations for addressing them.

5. Prove compliance with Industry regulations

There are several mandated security compliance regulations are there in each industry and many regulations like PCI DSS, OWASP Top 10, and SAN 25 require frequent pen-testing. Automated testing tools perform unlimited scanning to ensure complete coverage against that compliance.

6. Continuous Security Monitoring

You can schedule the scanners to periodically test your system for security weaknesses. Scans can be scheduled when your system changes or updates. Since these tools are regularly updated with the details of emerging threats, you won’t miss any critical vulnerabilities. As a result, you can quickly react when new vulnerabilities are identified.

A Winning Combination: Indusface WAS and Pen Testers

Penetration testing tools are designed for human extension, not a replacement. They allow penetration testers to concentrate on thinking out-of-box by taking over testing tasks, which take time but not intellectual power. When it comes to complete successful pen testing, it should never be a choice between pen testers vs automated penetration testing software. Instead, it should be a choice of which pen-testing tool will support your pen testers most.

For example, Indusface features Web Application Scanning (WAS) that allows you to defend your websites, web servers, and web applications against cyber-attacks like malicious SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other potential threats. This automation tool is designed to make the scanning process more efficient. Backed by the expertise of experienced security experts who ensures a detailed analysis of each vulnerability, which goes into effective penetration testing. With proof of concepts from manual pen testing for each vulnerability, you can achieve zero false positives in your testing process.

Take the advantage of all these capabilities and team expertise, utilize a massive threat library, and ensure that you leave no trail for adversaries at any level.