You wouldn’t brush your teeth once a year — it just wouldn’t be frequent enough to maintain proper care and hygiene of a body part you use every day. Similarly, it’s just not sufficient to perform a security test once a year to see how strong or vulnerable your organization is. Yet that’s been the legacy approach to security testing: bring a pen tester in for a few weeks, simulate attacks on your networks and systems to uncover your vulnerabilities, and write a report with a list of remediation tasks. Repeat the process the following year.
But this approach is no longer sufficient for organizations today. With each new application deployment, change to the environment, or remote device logging on, attack surfaces change daily, making point-in-time testing obsolete nearly immediately. Additionally, the timeline from when an attacker becomes aware of a vulnerability to the time it’s exploited has accelerated — as fast as 2 minutes 7 seconds. Finally, companies may face compliance issues, increased liability, or fines if they don’t integrate continuous testing.
What’s needed instead is a continuous testing approach. Here are five steps you can take today to adopt and implement continuous security testing in your organization.
Step 1: Change your mindset
The first step to improving your security posture begins with changing your mindset around your approach to security testing. Since static, point-in-time pen testing is no longer sufficient for understanding your security posture all year, you have to go from an assessment mindset to a competency mindset, where you are doing this testing recurrently on a cadence as frequently as possible so there are no surprises.
Step 2: Understand and inventory your attack surface
Next, you have to know what to protect. As organizations scale by moving to the cloud, deploying applications and updates daily, and expanding their footprint through remote devices, their attack surface only grows. Yet many businesses have no clue what assets they own, what clouds they’re in, or the current state of their environments — fewer than 1% of companies have visibility into 95% or more of their assets. If you can’t get a handle on your attack surface, the testing output will leave you with untested systems and unknown IT risks.
Step 3: Identify a modern penetration testing solution
When looking for a solution for continuous pen testing, some key areas to investigate include:
- How do they perform their tests? Learn more about how they conduct their testing, and if possible, look at past tests to see what was detected in which systems.
- How will you receive alerts? Understand how you’ll receive alerts and information about testing discoveries, and whether it will be through a platform, emails, or other forms of messaging. If a platform, look at how you can gain real-time visibility into what’s being tested and how your team will integrate with that platform.
- How will they report on their findings? Once you receive the report, you need to know how you can work with that information, like if you can manipulate it or search it, and that you can see what test was done when, by whom, and against which system.
- What’s the cost (and can you afford it)? Finally, look into the value offered for the price. Paying per vulnerability or per discovery is going to be hard for you to budget for, so investigate fixed pricing options. Additionally, ask if the cost includes unlimited retesting.
Step 4: Look for a hybrid approach
43% of CISOs believe that generative AI offers an advantage to cyber defenders — an increase from 17% just a year ago — so look for a solution that combines artificial intelligence and automation with a human touch. Automation gives you scalability and allows you to identify and automatically test new attack surfaces. The human portion then dives deep into areas unique to your organization, like infrastructure or applications that no one else has. By using a hybrid approach, you get the best level of comprehensiveness in your testing, but you also get to understand the impact as it relates to your business.
Step 5: Use a combination of tests to ensure full coverage
Continuous testing is the best way to truly understand the state of your security and where you need to take action on remediation. Four types of common testing that can help you more comprehensively understand and improve your security posture include:
External Penetration Testing: External pen testing helps you discover the risks and security vulnerabilities real-world hackers use to compromise and exploit. External pen testing discovers security holes in your websites, assets, services, configurations, and authentication processes. It also finds forgotten and vulnerable applications as well as the more uncommon attack paths.
Internal Penetration Test: Organizations need to protect their most critical assets from insider threats as well, simulating attackers who will move laterally and escalate privileges to gain access to your organization’s infrastructure.
Social Engineering: Employees can pose the greatest risk to your most important assets, too, which is why you also need to test your security posture and controls through different social engineering campaigns, including phishing, vishing, smishing, quid pro quo, pretexting, and watering hole attacks.
Web Application Testing: Test using real-world attack paths across all of your applications to identify risks before a breach occurs.
Decreasing Your Security Risk Today
It’s no longer enough to perform a security test once a year to see how strong your organization is. Instead, shift from point-in-time assessments to building continuous testing capabilities that enable a more offensive and proactive approach to identifying vulnerabilities, so you can keep pace with rapidly evolving threats and technologies.
