From Risk to Resilience: How Penetration testing strengthens your Security Posture

Cyber threats are not more than just a possibility, in today’s environment it’s a huge threat to all software development projects. Any organisation can become a victim, no matter how large (or small !). For example, in September 2024, the data for 6 million taxpayer identification numbers was breached in Indonesia. A total of 25 data samples were distributed illegally, including those of the President, the Minister of Finance, and the Minister of Economy. Imagine if that happened to your company!

Confidential customer data that you are required by law to protect could be sold by hackers to the Dark Web and used for nefarious purposes, especially ransomware attacks. Consequently, your company’s reputation could be seriously compromised, and you could lose your customers’ trust. A.D. Ryan in “Just a Number: a May – December Romance” states, “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.”

In developing your security posture, you need to consider the 3 pillars of security:

People

Process

Technology

People

Everyone in your business must be educated about security because hackers can use human error to penetrate your systems.

Process

When implementing Process Security, you should consider:

a/ two-factor authentication,

b/ restricting authorised access to the data, and

c/ clear and robust policies.

Applying Secure Software Development Life Cycle (S-SDLC) when developing your application also helps you to prevent cyber-attacks. SDLC is the framework that outlines how to reliably develop a quality piece of software. Development teams use it to keep a balance between costs, efficiency, and risks. S in S-SDLC stands for security. It represents a revised framework to embed security considerations and activities across all stages of the development cycle. Examples of good S-SLDC practices are:

a/ create a risk assessment when creating requirements

b/ define threat modeling when designing the application

c/ conduct static analysis on development, and

d/ apply security assessment and security configuration on the deployment.

Technology

To ensure that your technology stack is security resilient, make sure your company has a firewall and malware protection and always apply security updates and use secure configuration.

After applying the 3 pillars of security, don’t forget to evaluate it periodically with penetration testing. Conducting penetration testing periodically is one way to strengthen your security posture. Penetration testing can help your company to evaluate both your application and all of the people who are part of the system. The penetration tester team will simulate an attack on your application and then they can analyze the vulnerabilities.

Benefits of Penetration Testing

The following are the major benefits of conducting regular Penetration Testing:

Detecting vulnerabilities as soon as possible.

Vulnerabilities may come from flawed design at the beginning. These could allow an attacker to manipulate behavior and achieve their malicious goal. Never forget that every change you make when you improve your application may potentially cause a security gap. The attacker could detect and use that gap to exploit your application. Imagine your company never conducts a penetration test and you do not know your application’s vulnerabilities. An attacker may find a vulnerability before you, and then gain access to your resources, destroy, or take over your system. That’s why conducting the penetration test is necessary to strengthen your security posture. The penetration tester team will assist you in identifying vulnerabilities in your application. After you know your application’s vulnerabilities, your developer team can remediate them before the attacker exploits them.
Providing insights into remediating vulnerabilities.

After the penetration tester team identifies all vulnerabilities in your application and you receive the report, now you know your application’s vulnerabilities. The next step is to remediate them before an attacker finds and exploits them. The report that you receive from the penetration test team will assist your developer team in strengthening your security posture. They will provide information about how to prevent those vulnerabilities and what you should do to improve and patch the security gap. Additionally, your developer team now understands how to prevent vulnerabilities. As a result of making the recommended improvements, developers can be more aware of how to secure their product in the future.
Enhancing security awareness for your staff.

Imagine your company has completed comprehensive penetration testing and all major vulnerabilities have been fixed. But one day an attacker pretends to be an executive and sends an email to your admin staff to ask for the credentials. If your admin staff does not double check and gives the credentials to an attacker, then your investment in developing security would have been a massive waste of effort! To avoid this scenario in your company, you must conduct a social engineering penetration testing. If you conduct this assessment, you can identify your staff’s behavior, then you can make an evaluation based on the penetration tester report. So, your staff can learn from their mistakes and improve their awareness of security. The scope of the penetration test is not only on the application you want to test. Often the penetration testing scope also tests people who are a part of the system. The penetration tester will send an email phishing to your staff or pretend as an executive and then ask for the credentials of the admin staff. If your staff have knowledge of security awareness, they are not easily trapped. So, raising security awareness is vitally important to strengthen your security posture. Through this activity, you can educate your staff to be more aware of security, as they will learn and detect phishing in real life and not easily share the credentials with someone without first checking.
Helping your company to reduce long term risk and cost

The impact of a successful hacker attack on your application can be extremely expensive. Apart from the time (and money) you must spend to fix the issue, the other cost that you must pay is loss of the customer’s trust and reputational damage. As customers, they have trusted your company to keep their personal data secure within your application. If a data breach happens to your company, the client’s security is also seriously compromised. The hacker can sell or use your customer data for malicious purposes. Your customer will certainly hold your company accountable. After your company successfully restores the application, you need also to restore your reputation, and it will not be easy. As discussed previously, you can prevent cyber-attacks by developing security-first technology, educating people who are part of the system, and conducting regular Penetration Tests to evaluate your application’s vulnerabilities. Identifying and fixing vulnerabilities proactively is much cheaper than dealing with your reputational damage and customers’ loss of trust.
Data Privacy Regulation Compliance.

As a trusted company, you have a responsibility to protect your customers’ data because they are trusted to store their confidential information for your company. In certain jurisdictions such as Europe this is a legal requirement, and your team must be educated in the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) when dealing with European clients. Conducting penetration testing also helps your company to discover new ways that sensitive data could be exposed.

Conclusion: Changing Risk into Resilience!

Conducting penetration testing can strengthen your security posture, and your reputation as a trusted partner, because your company has remediated vulnerabilities in your application based on the penetration tester team report and the security awareness of the people who are part of the system has increased.

By becoming aware you can change that risk into resilience. Thus, you can increase trust by demonstrating that your company can protect their confidential data and your company’s reputation will be improved.