The Risks of Reducing Scope for Penetration Testing
Understanding the full scope of your penetration testing can prove invaluable when striving to avoid breaches and vulnerabilities in your machines, devices and systems. Defining this scope is vital towards ensuring that information and networks remain secure against malicious third parties.
Businesses are under more scrutiny than ever regarding our data, and so it is now up to them to do everything that they can to prevent further attacks and protect consumers, but there are businesses that fail to consider just how essential the scope of penetration testing can be. This can have significant negative effects on the safety of data and information contained within systems.
More than Merely Tick-Boxing
Many look at penetration testing and simply see a list of factors to check off a list to ensure they will be suitably prepared for any potential attacks. Taking steps to go further than merely ticking boxes will benefit you and help to protect against breaches and provide a wider scope of discovering vulnerabilities in your systems.
Why a Wide Scope is Most Effective
Having a wide scope regarding penetration testing allows you to be fully aware of the security and safety of your systems. To achieve this, you need to carry out pen tests on all machines, devices and all online services (including production & development services) located within your workplace, regardless of whether two machines are identical.
It is this kind of negligence that can increase the risk of succumbing to breaches later on. If you possess multiple devices, the restricting and reducing the scope on these devices will be detrimental to ensuring that you remain protected and could result in falling victim to attacks.
To guarantee the widest scope, you must run penetration tests on all machines and websites in your organisation as opposed to just a fraction. By testing any and all machines you can feel confident in your systems abilities to discover problems that could prove ruinous for your information.
Consistency is Key
Undertaking the correct measures to fully vet and analyse your systems before they go live is vital to ensuring that your information remains protected. These measures include continuous network monitoring, alerts on the most prominent risks, securing weaknesses early and reporting on the various levels of exposure.
This will increase your security infrastructure and help avoid hacks by going further than mere password and firewall protection. Repeating these measures as often as possible helps you widen your scope and allow for more guaranteed protection. Just because it worked once on one device does not mean it will continue without consistent observation.
It can be easy to assume that problems that have plagued other businesses in the past will not happen to you, but there is no discrimination when it comes to cyber attacks. Ensuring that you are protected by covering all bases and identifying issues immediately will give you peace of mind in the security of your machines.
By ignoring the dangers of not fully expanding the scope of your penetration tests, there is the risk of suffering breaches like we have seen before. To avoid these risks, do right by yourselves and your customers and increase, rather than reduce, your penetration testing scope.
