Businesses need to regularly scan the external available infrastructure and applications to protect against external threats. They also need to scan internally to protect against insider threat and compromised individuals. The worst situation is to have an exploitable vulnerability within your infrastructure, application or employees, that you are not aware of, as the attackers might be probing your assets for months or years.
Businesses need to conduct regular testing of their IT systems for the following key reasons:
- Adherence to CCPA or GDPR compliance
- Adherence to various industry compliances including HIPAA, HITECH, PCI or ISO 27001
- Ensure you maintain the trust of your customers, partners and markets
- To identify any weakness in the infrastructure (hardware), application (software) and people (social) in order to develop controls
- To ensure security controls have been well implemented and are effective – this provides assurance to information security and senior management
- To test applications that are often the avenues of attack (applications are built by humans who are fallible despite trying to follow best practices in software development)
- To discover new bugs in existing software (patches and updates can fix existing vulnerabilities, but they may inadvertently introduce new vulnerabilities)
When businesses are attacked through social engineering (soft target) the stronger perimeter controls are completely bypassed and less protected internal assets are exposed. The worst situation is to have an exploitable vulnerability within your infrastructure, application or employees, that you are not aware of, as the attackers might be probing your assets for months or years.
