Penetration Testing And Its Methodologies

• Pabitra Kumar Sahoo
• December 24, 2021
• 2 Comments

With the constant advancements in the IT industry, there’s constant risk of getting replaced by some competitor who provides much better features and best-in-class security in their products than you. 21st century consumers require privacy and smooth experience with better optimization for every application, software, website and etc. they use. But to create a secured product, you need to perform security testing on your products. There are many security tests available for IT products. One of which is penetration testing. Therefore, here we discuss the penetration testing and its methodologies.

But firstly, let us give a brief about Penetration Testing.

What is Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing, popularly is also known as pentest or pentesting.

Pentest is a type of security testing used to uncover vulnerabilities, threats and risks. Mostly from an attacker who could exploit software applications, networks or web applications. The goal is to identify and test all potential security vulnerabilities that are present in your product. Therefore, this establishes how important penetration testing is for product development!

Pen testing is solely based on security aspect of your product. So, it’s main agenda is examining the coding structures of your product to detect any loopholes or vulnerabilities.  Pentesters use penetration testing tools to expose any threat present in security layer. As a result, this allows testers to address any shortcomings of the product; before they become dangerous liabilities.

Pentesting reduces the magnitude of monetary and societal loss associated with successful data breaches and hijacking and business disruption of the product.

Whenever any business experiences hacks or hijacking of sensitive data, the costs of containment, recovery, public relations, and fines can force you to shut your business for good!

Thus, pentest aids brands in securing and ensuring the success of their product in the IT product market!

Finally, let’s dive into the methodologies or types of penetration testing.

Types of Penetration Testing: –

1) Black Box testing-

Black box pen-test is an attack with brute force. The simulation of the hacker is unaware of the product’s IT infrastructure. So, the hacker plants an all-out attack to try and identify the IT structure and exploit some weakness. This penetration testing does not provide the pen-tester with any information about the product, its source code or any software structure. The tester uses a trial and error approach to identify any defects or vulnerabilities pre-existing in the product’s IT structure.

This type of penetration testing is closest simulation to an actual cyber attack in the real world scenario. Although, it takes a long time to complete; this is the hardest and most critical penetration test for any IT product.

2) White Box testing-

White box penetration testing is the exact opposite of the Black box testing. In white box testing, the simulation of the hacker has complete knowledge of the product’s IT structure. This means, the knowledge of source codes, and software structure is present with the hacker. This provides the hacker with the ability to pin-point on specific parts or elements of the system or product to perform the cyber-attack.

The white box testing is quicker than black box testing. But, this type of penetration testing uses much more sophisticated pen-testing tools for acquiring much more detailed analysis.

3) Gray Box testing-

Gray box penetration testing uses manual and automated testing processes both. This is done in order to create a scenario in which the hacker might have partial knowledge about the products IT infrastructure. In this scenario, the hacker has the software codes, source codes but not the products IT structure completely.

Gray box testing is an amalgamation of white box and black box type of penetration testing. This allows the pen-testers to simulate an all-out cyber-attack while manually locating the security vulnerabilities.

Conclusion

Finally, we end our blog about penetration testing and its methodologies. We sincerely hope, we enabled you to now to determine and choose the right penetration testing partner for you and your product.

QualySec is India’s best QA and penetration testing company! We aim to improve our process & methodologies, we empower our team members to think outside the box in order to meet or exceed the expectations of our clients. We constantly innovate our best-in-class tools to give our clients the very best at an affordable price.

Contact us, and allow us to begin this beautiful journey of developing a secure and market breakthrough product!