The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 caused organizations worldwide to quickly adapt to the changing situation and shift to a remote working environment. While remote working introduced greater flexibility and autonomy for all workers in the organization, it also brought about several challenges that plagued organizations across the globe. Among these challenges was a huge concern for cybersecurity because of the increased number of cyber-attacks globally.
Increased Cyber-Attacks During The Pandemic
2020 saw a massive surge in cyber threats and cyber-attacks across the world. Several coronavirus-related phishing scams gripped organizations and individuals – and cybersecurity became the primary concern of the day.
But that’s not all. The shift to a remote working environment meant that many workers were exposed to security attacks when they were working from home. The attack surface increased manifold, and hackers and attackers took great advantage of this. They began to find new sophisticated ways of breaching security in organizations.
As a result, there were several security challenges that business owners have had to face regarding remote network connections, phishing attacks, and VPN connections.
Penetration Testing To The Rescue
One of the most critical ways in which organizations were able to keep hackers at bay is by engaging rigorous penetration testing practices for their security systems.
What exactly is penetration testing? Well, penetration testing as a service, also popularly known as ethical hacking or ‘pentesting’ is a practice where certified ethical hackers simulate a cyber attack to discover risks and vulnerabilities in a security system. Pentesting helps business owners keep their information and data safe and secure while also ensuring the security of their employees.
Penetration testing has been a popular solution for most organizations even before the pandemic. However, pentesting has never been as popular as it is today.
With the number of cyber-attacks on the rise due to the pandemic, it became increasingly important for pentesting practices to advance through the year. What are the various advancements that pentesting has undertaken due to the covid-19 pandemic? Let’s take a look!
Advancement Of Penetration Testing Through The Pandemic
Achieving overall cybersecurity is pretty much impossible for any organization out there. However, security systems can come close to being 100% protected with the help of penetration testing. During the pandemic, business owners and CISOs have turned towards penetration testing as the biggest solution to all of their problems. This has called for an incredible advancement in penetration testing practices and increased sophistication in tools and techniques.
Identifying High-Risk Vulnerabilities
Penetration testing has played a crucial role in identifying high-risk vulnerabilities in security systems during the Covid-19 crisis. Independent pentesters are highly capable of understanding security weaknesses and potential security breaches, and they have been making increasingly accurate diagnoses of potential security breaches throughout the pandemic.
Identifying weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the organization has always been the main aim of penetration testing. However, the pandemic forced pen testers across the world to up their game multi-fold. This is why Gartner has named penetration testing as one of the most important security tactics for the year 2021.
Ensuring Compliance
With security guidelines updated almost every day, businesses need to ensure compliance with established security standards. But with increased cybersecurity concerns, CISOs across the world have found it challenging to fight attackers and hackers and ensure compliance at the same time. Not to mention that most organizations have had to implement budget cuts even in their security teams. This has left the task of ensuring security compliance to penetration testing companies.
With the increase in demand for penetration testing, pentesting companies have naturally invested in various new tools and technologies to keep up with the requests. As a result, penetration testing companies are now no longer just experts in digging out security weaknesses and vulnerabilities – they are also experts at ensuring security compliance in organizations.
Providing Confidence
With an increased amount of sensitive information and data being handled through the internet (because of the shift towards remote working practices), under-confidence in the security systems is one of the major concerns for CISOs in most organizations. Third-party pentesting companies have been able to take care of this issue by providing an external perspective into the gaps and vulnerabilities in the security system. This has helped security teams feel more confident about cybersecurity in their organizations.
Increased Flexibility In Pentesting
The pentesting field has evolved and advanced to such an extent that there is now an immense amount of flexibility in pentesting practices. Several new tools and technologies have come to the fore that enable pentesting to work its magic no matter what kind of security system has been put in place in the company. It also does not matter what the scope of the pentesting is or what amount of budget is allocated for it. With increased automation in the pentesting field and advancement in technology, pentesting can now occur quickly and efficiently for almost every organization, no matter big or small.
Final Thoughts
With hackers and attackers becoming cleverer by the day, it is increasingly important for security officers to invest in pentesting practices. Whether this comes from an internal pentesting team or engaging the services of a professional third-party pentesting company, there is no doubt that penetration testing has become one of the core pillars of cybersecurity in 2021.
