#security testing experts

Technology has changed the way businesses operate, institutions function, and individuals carry out their activities. It has made our lives simpler and convenient, be it while paying utility bills, buying train/bus/plane tickets, booking cabs, shopping from eCommerce stores, or doing office work from remote locations etc. If there has been a proliferation of devices, platforms, frameworks, and networks to choose, businesses have a flurry of technologies to implement in order to provide the best customer experience. These technologies include Blockchain, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Internet of Things, and Cloud Computing to name a few.

On the other hand, if Information Technology has made the world a global village and facilitated the interchange of information through a range of device platforms, it has also brought with it the spectre of cybersecurity issues as well. According to statistics, the worldwide spending on tackling cybersecurity issues is expected to reach $96 billion by the end of 2018 (Source: Gartner.)

Consequences of cybersecurity issues

Cyber criminals are on a prowl worldwide looking for vulnerable systems and entities to steal sensitive assets. The threat is even more ominous when two thirds of organizations believe that they are vulnerable to security threats from viruses, trojans, malware, ransomware etc. Should these vulnerabilities are not plugged in time and safety measures not implemented, the consequences can be dire, both for the companies and individuals.

Sensitive information, be it of businesses, clients or customers can be stolen either by cyber criminals working independently or business rivals. The theft can drive the customers, clients and other stakeholders to lose trust in the concerned business.

Businesses can face costly lawsuits from customers and clients seeking compensation.

Businesses can fall foul of the regulatory authorities for not plugging their vulnerabilities or not carrying out the security testing of their products or systems.

Businesses can face stiff penalties from regulatory authorities or courts. These can hit at their bottom lines leading to the loss of competitive edge.

Major cybersecurity issues plaguing businesses

Lack of awareness among stakeholders: Even though the budget for shoring up cybersecurity measures is increasing, a majority of businesses across the world have not yet woken up to the challenge. The prevailing line of thinking is ‘it will not affect us,’ until it is too late. The management, in a majority of companies, seems to be focused on increasing the number of products in the market to stay competitive instead of considering security testing to be an option. In most cases, security testing services are not given enough resources to identify security vulnerabilities let alone plugging them.

Lack of tools: The increasing threat to cybersecurity from newer strands of viruses, trojans, and malware needs better firewalls and the implementation of strict Risk and Compliance protocols. However, companies running on margins and aiming at maximizing the ROI, do not invest in cutting edge firewall solutions.

Lack of expertise: There is a shortage of security testing experts across industry verticals who are adept at devising a robust security testing strategy to make the products security compliant.

How to deal with cybersecurity issues?

Implementing DevSecOps: The challenge to stay competitive and improve the customer experience has led businesses to implement Agile-DevOps methodology to develop, test, integrate, and deploy applications. This has led to the setting up of a seamless CI/CD pipeline wherein customer feedbacks are acted upon instantly and the product quality is enhanced to address the shifting market dynamics. Although this has led to the success of digital transformation initiatives, the security aspect has remained unchallenged.

To tackle the growing threat from cyber criminals and elements like malware etc, software application security testing should be made an integral part of DevOps leading to DevSecOps. According to DevSecOps, in addition to creating a quality culture, each and every stakeholder should be taken on board when it comes to executing application security testing. In fact, ensuring security should become everyone’s responsibility.

Selecting a security standard and devising a suitable security testing strategy: A business should implement an industry recognised security standard such as IEC, CSC20, or NERC CIP NIST among others after analyzing its pros and cons. To meet the standard, a proper security testing strategy should be devised by using relevant tools, processes and techniques.

Set up a budget to upgrade cybersecurity measures: Since a lapse in security preparedness can derail an organization, CFOs in consultation with CIOs should set up a budget to hire the best security testing experts and execute cutting edge cybersecurity testing.

Conclusion

Cybersecurity poses an existential threat to businesses with scores of viruses, trojans, malware, and ransomware wreaking havoc and leading to dire consequences. The best possible way to deal with cybersecurity issues is to integrate the strategies, methods, protocols, tools, and techniques concerning cybersecurity testing across verticals and departments of businesses.

Security has become the single largest challenge for the digital enterprises to grapple with. The reason for this is not hard to find, as about 75% of all breaches are found to take place due to the misconfiguration of applications, especially at their end points (Source: https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2753017.) Loss of revenue due to the security breaches is equally high. For, according to the BI intelligence report of 2016, the total revenue loss on account of mobile app frauds stood at a whopping $350 million. Given the enormity of the challenge, businesses have no option but to invest in strengthening the security aspect of the applications through rigorous application security testing.

What happens if application security testing is not done?

It severely compromises the quality of the application and leaves users at the mercy of the hackers and cyber criminals. The growing number of frauds and security breaches are a testimony to the threat.

The applications can be easily infected with malware, viruses, and trojans. This can not only undermine the functioning of the applications but worse, can lead to the siphoning of sensitive information and money.

Customer’s trust in the application and by consequence, the business is eroded. This can result in business loss in terms of brand image and ROI.

Businesses incurring additional costs to secure the application(s) post the breach.

Enterprises inviting lawsuits from affected customers.

Enterprises falling foul of the regulatory agencies and inviting strictures, penalties or an outright ban.

In the Agile or DevOps environment, carrying out application security testing should be alongside the development process. This is to ensure a better identification of bugs, faster time to market and an improved customer experience. The application security testing methodology can differ in its scope and objectives. The security testing of applications encompasses three types of methodologies -

Tiger Box: The methodology requires the security testing experts to hack into the application or software to find out the loopholes.

Black Box: The methodology involves the testing of the network and its various aspects. It includes the testing of the firewalls as well.

Grey Box: The methodology combines both white and black box testing to identify the structural vulnerabilities of an application.

In addition to following the above mentioned application security testing methodologies, security testing specialist use many tools as well. Below mentioned are the top 5 security testing tools that help testing experts to identify the vulnerabilities and validate the application.

Top 5 tools

#1 Network Mapper or NMAP: The tool checks for the vulnerabilities existing in the network of a business enterprise. With a built-in feature to automate the testing process, the open source tool creates a virtual map of the entire network and identifies the vulnerable areas. It uses raw data packets to determine the network hosts, services provided by the hosts, and the OS and type of firewalls used by the hosts.

URL: https://nmap.org/

#2 Metasploit: This popular open source tool or framework is used by certified ethical hackers as well as a large number of security testing experts. Built on the PERL platform, this integrated architecture of many Pen tools helps to launch cyberattacks from various access points. Armed with a ‘Meterpreter’ the tool flags the results after a vulnerability is breached. The results can be suitably interpreted to develop further test strategies.

URL: https://www.metasploit.com/

#3 Wireshark: The tool helps to identify the weaknesses of an application in real time by analyzing its traffic. It provides an easy to understand report and a colour coding scheme. The latter can help testers to investigate the loopholes further or isolate the erring data packet. The tool also helps to identify the threats such as SQL injection, memory buffer overflows, and data parameter pollution among others.

URL: http://www.wireshark.org/

#4 Vega: This GUI enabled testing platform based on Java comes with an automated scanner and proxy. It helps to identify threats such as cross site scripting, SQL injection, and header injection among others.

URL: https://subgraph.com/vega/

#5 Iron Wasp: Capable of generating HTML and RTF reports, this Python and Ruby based tool can detect a large number of vulnerabilities including false positives and negatives.

URL: https://ironwasp.org/

Conclusion

The digital revolution has transformed the world with its focus on time, speed, reach and quality. As its broad sweep continues to touch almost every aspect of our lives, cyber criminals have found its all encompassing ecosystem too lucrative to wreak havoc. Hence, the challenge before everyone connected to the digital world, with its vast repositories of sensitive government, business and personal customer information, is to remain ever vigilant with new safeguards put in place. The threat of data breach can not only impact the lives of end customers but can also ruin the brand equity of companies and institutions. Given the enormity of the threat of cyber crime, security testing experts often find themselves at their wits’ end while strengthening data security measures. As customers’ lives begin to be increasingly governed by software applications, the need for companies to make software security testing an important part of the overall SDLC, has become the sine-qua-non to fight the menace of cyber crime.

The digital platform has opened new vistas that till a few years back were considered part of science fiction. Today, there is hardly any activity that has not been touched by the digital revolution, more so after the advent of smartphones. Of late, we have become so dependent on software applications that willy-nilly we have become party to share sensitive personal information with app developers. Although increased digitization has made our lives easier, it has spawned a new threat of cyber crime that many of us have fallen victims to at some point of time or the other. The threat is not confined to common customers alone but applies to businesses, institutions and governments as well.

There have been many instances of data breach or breach of data security measures in banking institutions leading to a loss of people’s confidence in the system. It appears a constant game of cat and mouse is being played between security testing experts and cyber criminals with hurrahs and sighs drawn from each of the sides. Given below is a list of methods that are employed by cyber criminals to gain access into secured systems:

Phishing: Here, emails are sent to customers tricking them into revealing sensitive information. A typical example is the ‘lottery win emails from Nigeria,’ wherein bank details are sought from customers to receive the ‘jackpot money.’

Spam: Unsolicited mails containing malware or links to fraud websites, which mimic the designs of familiar websites are sent to customers. These emails trick customers into using these fraud links to share information.

Denial of Service: Also known as Distributed Denial of Service or DDOS, it includes sending a barrage of multiple service requests from a number of IP addresses to a site, preferably a financial one, causing it to crash.

Hacking: Any of the methods like phishing, malware, spyware, worms, identify theft, spam etc is employed to exploit the vulnerability of a system in order to gain entry and steal information. The theft of credit card information from banking servers can be one such example.

SQL injection: Here, wrong SQL statements are entered into input fields to force the site to share data with the attacker.  

In view of increased security threats that can come in many forms, application developers should mandatorily ensure software security testing is made part of the SDLC. Furthermore, the measures that can be put in place by security testing experts as part of security testing are as follows:

Penetration testing: System vulnerabilities are identified by penetrating through loopholes that might exist due to coding insecurities, and lack of adherence to security protocols.

Security standards: Companies should ensure their applications, processes, and sites adhere to security standards like ISO 27001, Sarbenes-Oxley, PCI DSS, and FISMA etc.

Source code testing: Here, the presence of malware, Trojan horse, worms, backdoor and other forms of attack vectors are identified and addressed.

Conclusion: