Types of Security Testing

Types Of Security Testing

In this article, we will cover the following topics.

• Importance of security testing
• What is security testing?
• Types of security testing
• Penetration Testing
• Risk Assessment
• Vulnerability Scanning
• Ethical Hacking
• Security Scanning
• Security Auditing
• Posture Assessment

Importance Of Security Testing:

Organizations need to keep their data safe from intruders and cyber attackers by implementing good information security measures. An organization needs to secure its data. Data security testing allows you to evaluate information security systems. The data held by an organization is really important and must be protected from unauthorized access.

What is Security testing?

Security testing is performed on software applications to identify vulnerabilities in them and protect the data and resources from cyber threats. Security testing is important to ensure that the software application works securely and cannot be used to steal data from other systems

Types of Security Testing:

Testing helps measure the security strength of a system or software. However, what type of security testing should be conducted is entirely up to the customer. There are different types of security testing some of them are given below.

1. Penetration Testing: Penetration testing is a type of security testing in which real-time cyber-attacks are simulated against a particular system. Penetration testing is performed by ethical hackers to determine the security risks of a particular computer system or software. In penetration testing, hackers search for potential vulnerabilities, taking precautions to ensure that they will not make the system vulnerable.
2. Risk Assessment: Risk assessment testing is a process to identify and analyze security risks present in an application, software, system, or network and then proceeds to take necessary steps to mitigate the risks.  It is used by organizations to prevent vulnerabilities and security-related defects. It works by recreating common threat scenarios or building a comprehensive list of security threats.
3. Vulnerability Scanning: Vulnerability scanning is the examination of a computer system or network with the help of automated tools. This examination determines the list of vulnerabilities present on the system and helps in finding the possible solutions to remove these. There are 5 different types of vulnerability scanning, are as follows:
• Network-based scanners
• Host-based scanners
• Wireless scanners
• Application scanners
• Database scanners
4. Ethical Hacking: Ethical hacking is the method of testing the security of a program or network by hacking it with the consent of an authorized individual. Every ethical hacker has to get permission from the concerned authority before they carry out ethical hacking. Ethical hacking is the art of finding out the unprepared system vulnerabilities by pretending as a hacker and testing the security of computer systems. A security tester would have to go through deep testing methodologies to test the safety of computers against hackers.
5. Security Scanning: Security scanning is used to check the flaws in the system and network. It takes place not only on regular basis but also scheduled for a particular time. Once the testing is over the issues can be handled with the help of tools and solutions. Security scanning is the most essential part of information security testing, and it helps in finding out any possible flaws that can be used by hackers. The suppliers mostly carry out security scanning so that they can provide a secure application to their customers.
6. Security Auditing: Security auditing is conducted on the information system of an organization to know how viable its security strategy is and also whether the security implementation is done according to the standards and regulations. Security auditing is a process that allows an organization to determine whether all the devices and information are adequately protected.
7. Posture Assessment: Posture assessment tests the state of security between an organization and its environment, continuously. In the current scenario, this process leads to the road map for the security program to safeguard the organization from different forms of threats. This involves integrating technical and organizational measures within the context of an entire IT service management framework. Posture assessment ensures your vulnerability assessment is aligned with the risks of your organization and thus also increases your efficiency.

Conclusion: Whether it's developing websites or writing code, software developers need to build security testing into applications from the start. This is an important part that can be easily overlooked. However, it becomes more crucial when we start talking about businesses and other organizations that store and process personal information. Over the last decade, we have seen a rise in security testing. However, the market is still flooded with products that are using insecure coding practices. So, security testing plays a key role in every organization.