Do you usually conduct application testing before releasing? In this article you will find out why conducting outsourced penetration testing can strongly strengthen your application security level and your brand image.
1) If your developers do QA testing
If you do have QA processes in your development lifecycle, this is very good! This allows your developers to fix many bugs that could be in the code of your application.
However, development and security are separate skills. Most developers have not been trained in application hacking, which is why they will not be able to test for security flaws.
Furthermore, conducting penetration testing requires an “attacker’s view”. For a developer who built a website or a software, considering it from a completely different viewpoint can be quite challenging!
2) If you have an internal pentester
If you do have a qualified pentester in your team, this is even better! Complementary to your developers, your pentester will identify your application vulnerabilities and suggest technical remediation solutions.
But you should still conduct outsourced penetration tests from time to time. Taking a new look at your application will really reinforce security, because an external pentester will bring in his knowledge and experience accumulated from a much wider set of applications (several technical and functional contexts).
Hacking is both a technical and a creative job, this is why you can really benefit from experienced specialists who have worked on other applications than these from your internal portfolio.
3) If you don’t do any testing
Do you know that application security is a key matter? Your customers and partners will probably challenge you soon about security.
Better to take the lead and get the job done by conducting a first security audit and have most common vulnerabilities fixed.
If you do not have specific application security skills in your team, you should contact a qualified provider.
4) How to choose the right penetration testing services provider?
A major challenge when outsourcing IT skills is choosing the right service provider.
Several criteria must be considered: quality, pricing, availability…
According to your own security skills and your budget, you might not choose the same services. But whatever your constraints are, you might find difficult to compare the quality level of several providers: sometimes « young hackers » who are passionate about their jobs can do a better job than senior consultants working for big auditing firms…
To address this problem, you can choose to buy penetration testing services with success fees. In this way you will be able to challenge your pentester about his ability to find vulnerabilities on your platform!
Vaadata innovates to make cybersecurity more accessible to most companies, with its new pricing model that varies according to the number of flaws found. Do you need more information? Please read this page: https://www.vaadata.com/en/web-security-audits-pricing/