Today’s digital businesses across industries are most impacted by rampant cyber-attacks causing monetary losses along with brand reputation. Common cyber-attacks include Phishing, DDoS, SQL injection, password spraying, ransomware, malware, Crypto-jacking, zero-day exploits, etc. It is therefore important for all types of digital businesses to analyze their cybersecurity posture and adopt effective security testing methods to protect their most valuable digital assets from cyber threats and hackers. There are many benefits enterprises get by leveraging security testing.

What is the importance of Leveraging Security Testing?

Some of the important benefits for businesses leveraging security testing include:

• Helps to identify and fix vulnerabilities in applications, systems, data, networks, and infrastructure
• Ensures the security of sensitive data and reduces app and network downtime
• Helps businesses to protect their brand reputation by safeguarding their assets and infrastructure
• Empowers regulatory compliance by helping businesses comply with security standards
• Protects businesses from cyber threats and vulnerabilities and exploits previously unknown security holes before attackers ensuring safety.

Hence, businesses should leverage different types of security testing such as Security audits, Penetration testing, Vulnerability scanning and assessment, Source code review, Web application security testing, Static application security testing (SAST), Dynamic application security testing (DAST), Security posture assessment, etc. These methods should be adopted to keep their systems and assets safe from threats and vulnerabilities. Let us know about the five major types of security testing methods.

What are the five major types of Security testing businesses should know and adopt?

There are many types of security testing methods that businesses should know and adopt, but the five major types have been given below:

1. Penetration Testing
2. Vulnerability Scanning
3. Web Application Security Testing
4. Mobile App Security Testing
5. API Security Testing

1. Penetration Testing

What is penetration testing?

Penetration testing is also known as PEN testing wherein security testers deliberately target an application to find and exploit flaws. Further, this pen testing is a structured method in which a professional tester or an ethical hacker, authorized by an organization, mimics the techniques and strategies used by hackers to identify vulnerabilities in the organization’s applications, systems, or networks. Undoubtedly, organizations that adopted proper pen tests on their systems and applications were able to survive cyber threats and did not have any business continuity issues.

What are the various types of penetration testing?

Some of the most important penetration testing types include Web application pen testing, Physical penetration testing, Wireless penetration testing, Internal and External Network pen testing, Mobile application pen testing, Black box, Gray box, Social engineering, Cloud penetration testing, White box testing types, etc.

Benefits for businesses with penetration testing

• It helps to identify vulnerabilities
• It improves regulatory compliance
• It provides proactive defence
• It also helps developers make fewer errors and learn more about security.

Real-world examples of successful penetration testing

• The Equifax data breach
• The DDoS attack on Dyn
• The Target Data Breach
• The Canadian Government Cybersecurity Data breach
• The Ransomware attack on Norsk Hydro

2. Vulnerability Scanning

What is vulnerability scanning?

Vulnerability scanning is the process of identifying, assessing, and analyzing security weaknesses in organizations’ systems, applications, networks, and infrastructure to help mitigate potential threats and improve overall security posture.

What are the common vulnerabilities identified by scanning?

It is a proactive mechanism for detecting and identifying weaknesses within an organization’s digital infrastructure. As modern cyber-attacks are increasing rampantly in an unprecedented manner, businesses should adopt vulnerability scanning as an essential tool to stay ahead of potential breaches. Some of the important aspects include:

• Uncovers security gaps and weak points in systems.
• Outdated and unpatched software
• Misconfigurations that expose sensitive data
• Open ports that might serve as entry points

How do you think vulnerability scanning complements penetration testing?

Typically, vulnerability testing acts as a component of penetration testing and helps security testers identify which of the vulnerabilities to target during a test. Typically, pen testing costs more than vulnerability testing and these scans can span across an entire attack surface or be limited to a certain subset. This vulnerability scanning provides continuous monitoring and compliance support, while pen test simulates real-world attacks.

3. Web Application Security Testing

This is an important security testing method that involves a process to evaluate the security of a web application to identify and analyze the threats and vulnerabilities.

The 5 common web application vulnerabilities include

Cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, Broken Authentication, Security Misconfiguration, and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF).

How should businesses protect their web applications from cyber-attacks?

In order to address these vulnerabilities proactively, businesses should adopt secure coding practices, regular vulnerability testing, and adhere to security standards to significantly reduce risks to web applications. Moreover, protecting web applications from cyber-attacks requires a multi-layered approach that combines best coding practices, robust infrastructure, and continuous monitoring.

What are the best practices businesses should adopt for web application security?

Businesses should implement secure coding practices, use web application firewalls, enforce strong authentication with multi-factor authentication (MFA), implement access controls, and conduct regular security testing.

4. Mobile App Security Testing

Mobile app testing ensures the application functions seamlessly across various devices, platforms, and network conditions while mobile app security testing helps businesses to safeguard user data and ensure the app is free from cyber threats.

What are the benefits of mobile app security testing?

• Protects user information
• Enhances user trust and protects brand reputation
• Identifies vulnerabilities and improves app performance
• Ensures scalability of the app and provides a competitive advantage

How to secure your mobile apps from threats and vulnerabilities?

Typically, securing mobile apps from threats and vulnerabilities requires a comprehensive approach that spans development, deployment, and maintenance. Some of the important aspects of mobile app security include securing the development lifecycle, protecting and securing the data, authenticating and authorizing data securely, validating inputs, and securing the APIs. Moreover, businesses should also implement effective app security features and often perform security testing to ensure secure third-party integrations.

What are the key areas of focus for mobile app security testing?

The key areas for mobile app security include data storage security, data transmission security, authentication and authorization, input validation, secure API integrations, cryptography, and device security, proper session management, and secure coding practices.

Important 6 tools and techniques for mobile app security testing

5. API Security Testing

What is the importance of API security?

API security is vital for protecting sensitive data, ensuring business continuity, and building trust with users and partners. As APIs grow in use and complexity, implementing robust security measures becomes essential to mitigate risks and enable secure innovation. API security is important as it prevents data breaches, protects brand reputation, safeguards from cyber threats and vulnerabilities, and enables secure integrations.

4 Common API vulnerabilities and how to address them

The four common API vulnerabilities include broken authentication, rate limiting factors, insecure data exposure, and improper access control. Thus, securing these APIs requires addressing these issues by implementing robust authentication, enabling access control, and adopting effective monitoring controls. Further, businesses need to take up regular audits and API security testing to maintain a secure API environment.

Best practices for API security testing

Some of the best practices for API security testing include testing all inputs for expected data types, lengths, and formats. Test authentication and authorization should be taken up, and proper data protection of sensitive data should be taken up, along with implementing rate limiting and throttling processes. Moreover, it is essential to perform vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. Thus, by adopting and following the best practices, businesses can identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in their APIs, ensuring robust security.

Conclusion

As today’s digital businesses are more vulnerable to cyber threats and attacks, they should adopt different types of security testing methods. Security testing protects businesses from threats and vulnerabilities of their systems, data, networks, and infrastructure. Some of the important types of security testing include Pen testing, Vulnerability scanning, Web application security testing, Mobile application security testing, and API testing to ensure their assets are protected from any possible cyber invasions by hackers. Businesses should choose trusted security testing services provider to ensure and get the complete benefits of these testing methods. Only experienced testing services providers have well-trained security testers and ethical hackers to enable the best security testing methods and help your business to be well guarded from cyber-attacks.