Is The Decision Of Killing Penetration Testing Apt?

Let’s imagine you are a software developer who has developed a top-notch and efficient software. Turned out, it was good enough and in the first year it gained a lot of appreciation from the masses. As a result, you started working on other projects and completely forgot about this one. Though the popularity of your software didn’t fall, critics came forward and started pointing out loopholes in it. Well, you didn’t mind yet let the software be as it is. After 2-3 years, people started wondering why you aren’t improving it and came up with their own ideas. Ultimately experts decided that the other software that are being updated frequently should be deployed rather than yours!

Well, from this you might have got an idea about what happens when a software to test network and data security is not maintained and upgraded. Each day new vulnerabilities and threats are showing up and we cannot trust older tactics to overcome them! Same is the case with penetration test or pen test! There are prominent evidences that penetration testing has lost its efficiency long time back and nobody is doing anything to upgrade it! So, if you seek answer to, if the pen testing should be killed, it is yes!

What Are the Problems with Pen Testing?

It’s been reported that design is flawed and is no longer efficient to fulfil the expectations. Also, the execution is no longer efficient and there is a lot of room for improvement. Though it is widely used, it cannot accommodate the features required for businesses and firms active today. We cannot forget that most of the businesses these days have an immature network security programs and they need help with basic practices of security to save their business and not pen tests!

 

Well, why the experts have started opposing pen test? Because they are slow and expensive. Also, they are of no help in case of patching, hardening, network isolation, etc. So, consider the situation in which you are funding, staffing and working seriously for network security, but your products aren’t safe, and your efforts aren’t helping either. This implies that the approach we are following is not working and we need improvisations. However, we cannot just discard the pen tests as they make firms realize that security and data privacy should be taken seriously.

What Do We Need to Fix?

We need to understand that when we are not doing penetration testing, we know that there are some network security flaws that we have to deal with. But after we have done the same, we struggle to understand the 90- page pen test report! We forget that pen test is an engagement task that will help in securing our network and systems,  and that it is not the entire to-do list for it!

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Pen Test Is Not the Golden Child, Then Who Is?

We need something upgraded. Though it is still developed and tested, but we need it right now! If your organization is hit by malware infections quite often, it’s not pen testing you need! You cannot detect aggressive ports scanning, detect brute force attacks, or ransomware with pen tests, can we? The attacks on Maersk and FedEx depicted us the same!

So, we need an upgrade of pen test that is automated and comes with a concise report. Also, it should be able to attack the simulations for testing purpose! Experts are still working on a full-fledged program to help you but there are some small software available that are efficient to test and suggest methods to patch small gaps in your network!

An alternative approach that can be used is Crowdsourced security. Also, tools like OWASP Zed Attack Proxy Project, Ironwasp can be used.

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The Final Verdict

Until we find anything relevant and efficient, we need to focus symptoms just not stay busy in finding the root causes for the same. We should take preventive methods rather than being ready to recover after we have been attacked! This way, we’ll do a better job in securing our systems and network. Do you think otherwise? Don’t forget to tell us in the comments section below!