You might have read many of these already but here is our take on this:
Many organisations carry out at least one or two pen-tests during the year.
Here are 6 reasons to conduct a pen-test.
What is a Pen-test?
Penetration testing involves finding and exploiting as many vulnerabilities in your computer system. These tests are conducted in businesses to help identify the effectiveness of an organization’s vulnerability management program. These check whether an organisation’s networks, assets, platforms, hardware or applications are vulnerable to an attacker.
What is a Red Team Penetration Test?
These engagements are designed to achieve a specific goal using a simultaneous approach to gain access to sensitive server or business-critical application. They are heavily focused on emulating an advanced threat actor to identify gaps in the organisations defense strategy. A Red Team Pen Tests involves a lot more people, resources and time.
Unlike Pen-tests where a blue team knows when these particular tests are conducted, in the case of red team penetration tests a company’s blue team are not aware when the assessment is taking place. During the engagement if a targeted company detects a red team activity, the blue team responds as if it were a real attack.
How are they similar?
Both these tests benefit the security posture of a business. They uncover the risks and vulnerabilities that an organisation faces within their security infrastructure. Most mature organisations who have already conducted scans, assessments and patches also do these rounds of tests.
How are they different from each other?
One of the main difference is the time factor, a pen test can take a few weeks or maybe about a month but a red team engagement is longer, it can take weeks, months or even years.
An attack can happen at any second, but is a business ready for one?
Penetration tests are standard while red team engagements involves constantly creating new tools and techniques to find their way into the system.
The two reports are different; a red team is narrative than a pen test, which provides a list of findings. Here the details include steps on how the compromise took place like detailing the inspection, initial compromise, lateral movement and ex-filtration.
Why should a business conduct a red team pen-test?
A Red team penetration test shows how ready a business is for an attack, how do they detect and respond to a real case scenario.
It depends on what your end objective is, if your business is about to launch an application or new site, a pen-test might work best for you to test and discover the security gaps for that app or site or project.
If you want to assess your complete organisation’s security posture, a red team penetration testing engagement will be the best fit for you. Otherwise, you are looking to pay a higher cost by conducting individual tests, phishing campaigns and additional assessments.
At the end, it depends on what works best for your business.
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We do not want to preach about security but we want every individual in an organisation to practice it. If you would like to speak to our subject matter experts for further advice, call us: 1800 903 552 or e-mail us.