Pen Testing Should be Done More than Once a Year – Here’s Why:
Penetration testing, or pen testing, is a critical strategy for boosting an organization’s cybersecurity profile. Pen tests probe a system’s cybersecurity defenses to find and fix vulnerabilities in its digital infrastructure before hackers and malicious actors can discover them.
Unfortunately, most organizations don’t see the urgency of performing more than one pen test in a calendar year. However, they must fully grasp cybersecurity’s turbulent, fast-moving, and lopsided nature. Constant vigilance and testing are required because system defenses must always be right, 100% of the time, to thwart attacks. Conversely, an attacker only has to be right once.
Why does pen testing need to be done more than once a year?
- Cybersecurity is always fluid, never static
- Cybersecurity is a journey of improving security, never a point of destination to be reached
Therefore, organizations need to evolve continuously to meet an ever-changing security landscape. Regular penetration testing helps them meet this objective through the following tenets:
- Cybersecurity’s rules of engagement are constantly changing—for instance, moving away from traditional IT infrastructure to data-centric security and embracing zero-trust architecture over perimeter defenses. Penetration tests enable organizations to ascertain whether their current defenses match up well against cybersecurity best practices.
- Hackers are continually locked in a cat-and-mouse game of seeking to circumvent known defenses. Highly motivated threat actors, some from well-financed organized crime syndicates and rogue nation-states, are constantly producing new attack vectors and highly sophisticated zero-day threats. These malicious payloads pack improved capabilities to evade detection and compromise defenses. Adherence to conducting pen tests gives organizations the ability to prepare, plan, and implement preventive strategies.
- Malware and viruses with new signatures and capabilities are being developed, discovered, and deployed daily. The dynamic nature of cybersecurity means businesses must anticipate and prepare for new vulnerabilities and threats and develop remediation strategies.
It’s crucial to establish proactive instead of reactive threat management
The corollary to the dynamic nature of the cybersecurity threat environment is the urgency for organizations to adopt a take-charge mentality. Instead of waiting to react and respond to events, taking proactive steps with penetration tests is the best course of action.
With the high premium placed on data and online assets in the digital economy, executives should understand that it’s no longer a question of if their organizations will get attacked but when.
The following points emphasize the urgency of implementing regular penetration tests to keep your organization prepared for unanticipated eventualities:
- Cyber defenses can quickly become obsolete. Threat signatures to thwart zero-day malware are being scrapped for machine language-based solutions that flag anomalous behavioral patterns. As a result, organizations need to evaluate their current security strategies’ efficacy constantly.
- Since cybersecurity risks are dynamic creatures, they must be regularly reassessed to determine whether they need to be downgraded, upgraded, or fortified.
- In cybersecurity, time is of the essence, so software vulnerabilities must be identified promptly and patched immediately. Any time lag is consequential, giving attackers enormous headway to burrow further into the corporate network by moving laterally inside the compromised assets.
- Pen tests boost an organization’s operational efficiency by keeping it up to date with the prevailing threat landscape.
One overriding method to remain proactive is to train employees in areas of need to bolster their cybersecurity readiness. Therefore, regularly conducted penetration tests assist organizations in recognizing potential security threats before they happen and evaluating the necessity for security information and event management training.
Regular pen testing helps build an accurate risk profile and assessment
A cybersecurity risk profile sketches out an organization’s known risks and the types of threats that it faces. Since risk profiles are quantitative analyses, they cannot be accomplished without the objective input of penetration tests.
The core components in building a risk profile include risk identification, monitoring, and measurement and risk assessment, including the context and response to risk. Consequently, to successfully build a risk profile, a pertinent question that InfoSec professionals ask is whether a pen test has been performed and how recently it occurred.
An organization’s threat model must be constantly updated, especially when new IT infrastructure and endpoints that increase the attack surface are introduced into the system. Periodic pen tests help companies determine whether their security goals and objectives are still pertinent, given the context and prevailing risk environment.
Misconfigurations are often inadvertently introduced with new IT resources. Weak passwords, exposed secrets, and inadequate access controls continuously pose constant threats. Consistently conducting pen tests helps uncover these incidents.
Implementing frequent pen tests also helps uncover open-source and supply chain vulnerabilities among the flaws that sneak into a business’s software architecture. Regular pen tests enable companies to create a threat intelligence management system that is pinpoint accurate.
Maintain regulatory compliance
Most businesses routinely deal with customer data and information that requires confidentiality and privacy. Typical examples include patient health records, credit card details, social security numbers, and bank account numbers.
To prevent abuse and strengthen protections on how this information is stored and secured, government agencies around the world have mandated regulatory compliance. However, without conducting regular penetration tests, organizations can’t be assured that their system protocols are current.
Moreover, regulations and privacy laws compel organizations to juggle security compliance demands from various jurisdictions. For instance, while the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is from Europe, it is far-reaching, impacting how companies worldwide handle their customers’ personal information.
In addition, industry and privacy laws are primarily dynamic. Most companies also need to contend with diverse regulations, such as HIPAA and HITECH in healthcare, FINRA and FFIEC in financial services, and PCI DSS in the retail industry. Therefore, organizations must routinely test and evaluate whether their systems align with IT governance and regulatory mandates.
To avoid severe penalties for violating regulations like GDPR (up to 4% of global revenue or €20 million, whichever is deemed higher), companies have a huge incentive to implement pen testing more than once a year.
Regular pen testing expands the possibility of collaborative and continuous assessments
While InfoSec professionals should spearhead efforts to bolster system defenses, cybersecurity is best maintained under an atmosphere of organization-wide buy-in to be effective. Regular penetration testing helps establish a culture that fosters a collaborative cybersecurity approach in the following ways:
- Frequent penetration testing will likely facilitate purple teaming, or bringing together the opposing red and blue test teams. This further breaks down the silos between the teams.
- Regular purple teaming has the potential to influence the company culture, leading to a more collaborative approach to cybersecurity by bringing together other stakeholders invested in securing the organization’s crown jewels. This enhances the organization’s overall security posture.
Like most disciplines, cross-functional expertise and collaboration improve security outcomes. This purple teaming and collaborative culture from continuous pen tests will educate business stakeholders (executive boards, CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs) on how to mitigate security risk wisely.
Reduce costs while improving outcomes
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 30% of critical infrastructure organizations will experience a security breach. To forestall this, it advocates that security and risk management leaders adopt a holistic security approach that evaluates the security posture of all systems while investing in threat intelligence. These intelligence-driven objectives are difficult to attain without continuous penetration testing.
Implementing continuous penetration tests, especially during the product development cycle, drives down costs. Moreover, with the adoption of shift-left security and DevSecOps practices, regular testing doesn’t need to slow time to market or reduce product life cycles.
As a result, regular pen tests should be viewed as an investment rather than an expenditure.
Conclusion
While C-suite executives should treat cybersecurity like a business decision, Richard Addiscott, a senior director analyst speaking at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, admonished that “we can’t fall into old habits and try to treat everything the same as we did in the past.”
Research finds that the right cybersecurity balance lies between “desired cybersecurity outcomes (levels of protection) and the cost to achieve those outcomes.” Frequent testing and assessments help organizations derive outcome-driven metrics needed to achieve this balance.