Why is Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration testing a must for successful quality engineering?

The CEO of a reputed law firm was once asked: “If you were to choose between losing 100 million dollars’ worth of client deals or an existing set of clients data, what would you choose?”

He paused for a moment and calmly replied: “As someone who has built this business simply on the basis of stringent client confidentiality and data security, I couldn’t give two cents about the 100 million. Continual brand assurance comes from keeping your customers sacred.”

Organizations are highly protective of their data, and rightly so. With hackers getting smarter by the minute and increased connectivity touchpoints leaving more to be exposed, a data breach or attack is just around the corner.

QA professionals swear by the vulnerability assessment and penetration testing combination as a part of their extensive cyber security testing efforts. This article will highlight why organizations with digital business transformation on their minds need to have VAPT on their comprehensive testing strategy checklist.

But first, what is VAPT?

Vulnerability assessment and penetration testing are two specific types of tests that determine a system’s resilience against security breaches and expose the underlying faults in an application’s design, implementation, and internal controls.

Let’s break them individually to understand better.

A vulnerability assessment process can only discover those vulnerabilities that are already present in your system. It is generally considered less reliable than a penetration test as it cannot differentiate between defects that can cause severe damage and defects that are less likely to or won’t cause any damage to your system.

Vulnerability scanners are used to alert enterprises whenever a potential or existing vulnerability is found in their application. A vulnerability assessment report paves the way for penetration testing. It is a simple process that doesn’t dig too deep; it simply highlights system security issues.

A penetration test on the other hand is more profound, complex, and a useful method that studies the susceptibilities found in the VA process. The pen testing phase measures the degree of vulnerabilities in the system and confirms if the vulnerabilities exist.

Due to the irreversible changes that pen tests can cause, they need to be performed more carefully and carried out by expert pen testers.

Together, these security testing measures can help in protecting your organization by screening security weaknesses and providing guidance on how to address them.

How to perform a VAPT: A checklist

Organizations that are just embarking on their comprehensive quality engineering journey might have limited skills and knowledge for performing a VAPT. Therefore, we’ll underline the necessary steps for you to understand:

Steps in vulnerability assessment:

1. Define the goals and objectives you wish to achieve through the VAPT processes.
2. Define the scope of the assessment, whether it is a black-box, white-box or grey box testing.
3. Gather information about the IT environment.
4. Use vulnerability scanners to spot vulnerabilities.
5. Analyze identified vulnerabilities and devise a pen testing plan.

Steps in penetration testing:

1. Gather information from the VA stages and go over the investigation reports.
2. Discover and scan loopholes- open ports, hosts, and subdomains.
3. Exploit the system.
4. Perform the penultimate analysis and review.
5. Utilize the test results to determine remediation measures.

Why is VAPT necessary?

VAPT is a testing exercise and a means to conduct a complete evaluation of your application, mainly to spot those dangerous and exposed ambiguities that could deter a positive user experience.

Regular vulnerability assessments protect data from both internal and external threats

By understanding the major loopholes that could trigger cybersecurity attacks, you can be well prepared to take remedial action and make the application safer and secure. In addition, VAPT allows you to gain an observational understanding of threats that our application is facing.

Here are a few key reasons why VAPT should be a part of your comprehensive digital assurance strategy:

1. Necessary for compliance standards and brand assurance
   
   Data protection laws such as the GDPR and standards such as the ISO 27001 and PCI DSS mandate a thorough VAPT check for organizations looking to achieve the necessary compliance.
   
   By abiding by these stringent security measures, the application or web service establishes itself as a user-friendly, trustworthy and reliable system for sharing data or indulging in any kind of business communications and transactions.
2. For data protection from internal threats

There have been instances in the past where disgruntled employees/ex-employees have had their shares of a vendetta by introducing ransomware, phishing, or hacking into the security systems and altering business-critical data.

Timely VAPT can help keep this in check by regularly updating access details and looking for any gaps in the application.

1. For 360° protection from threats
   
   VAPT enables end-to-end application testing, thereby assuring its impregnable security, be it from the client-side, server-side, or in third-party code libraries.
   
   It reduces the possibility of any intruder or hacker toying with the system due to unauthorized access and protects the system against loss of information.

Challenges of VAPT (and how to handle them)

1. Prioritizing vulnerabilities
   
   Sometimes non-critical issues are pushed under the rug in a trade-off for more business-critical issues. 100% commitment to quality means remediating all risks irrespective of their potential to damage the system.
   
   Solution: To decrease the technical debt, organizations need to learn how to balance their defects, especially in the documenting and managing phases of defect management. Assigning values to these defects and calculating their opportunity cost can help.
2. Testing the hidden parts of applications (easter eggs)
   
   Functional testers are mostly busy handling front-end and back-end issues, while performance testers are occupied with stress and load tests. Therefore, it is the pen-testers responsibility to investigate the security aspects and defend the system against a multitude of threats.
   
   Solution: Ethical hacking allows pen testers to exploit all parts of the system, even the hidden system functionalities, and carry out simulated, authorized tests to check the robustness.
3. Causing ultimate damage to the system
   
   Pen tests cause willful damage to the application under test to check the application’s behavior when validated and verified. Some developers may find this unpleasant, especially when there is an impending deployment pipeline.

Solution: There is a need to shift focus from viewing defects as bottlenecks delaying the release to viewing them as the key to product improvement. A secure tamper-proof system is 100X better than a broken system.

How to select a trusted VAPT and quality solutioning provider?

Organizations looking to maintain threat-free and seamlessly running systems should focus on one thing:

Shift left cybersecurity to manage it proactively with penetration testing.

The dedicated efforts of a quality engineering solutions provider can help you manage cyber threats proactively and improve your embedded security systems by identifying vulnerabilities early on and thus proactively preventing attacks.

Look for 3 specific attributes when entrusting your VAPT and application security to an outsourced QA team.

● The level of experience and expertise

● Trained QA professionals

● The testing approach and QA methodology followed

If a QA organization’s core values align with the security testing requirements of your organization, then you’ve found the ideal match. Choosing the right security testing partner can make a world of difference when addressing gaps in your cyber system, so choose wisely.