Automated Penetration Testing

Penetration Testing engagements test an organization's security controls against a real-world attacker. During a pentesting engagement, security professionals utilise adversary techniques to find weaknesses in existing people, processes and technology.

The goal is to evade security controls and breach the organization on the defined scope and objectives. Meanwhile, unaware that it is an authorised activity, the blue team attempts to identify and block the malicious actions.

The challenges with traditional penetration testing are:

• Various tools and infrastructure are required
• There is a lot of manual effort involved
• Only a fraction of the organization's assets are tested
• The result depends on the skill of the team performing the audit
• As it depends on a human analyst, it is not scalable

Understanding the need for Automation

The need for skilled pentesters has exploded in recent years. It has become essential to streamline the process for maximum efficiency. However, there is a need to look for security issues continuously, where automated penetration testing comes in.

Automated Penetration Testing brings a better system allowing for continuous and automatic discovery of the enterprise attack surface. It is a system that automatically understands the vulnerabilities, determines the method of exploitation and launches safe attacks which mimic a real-world threat. Automated Pentesting identifies attack paths that conventional tools miss out on.

It is a game-changing approach that gives continuous visibility and is unmatched in speed with traditional red team engagements. A penetration test is conducted only on a few known applications or systems. In contrast, Automated Penetration Testing can discover the attack surface, making it super efficient and fast.

Benefits of Automated Penetration Testing

• It is completed is automated. It is a continuous system that can run faster and more efficiently than a human analyst.
• It can automatically test your systems against the latest vulnerabilities. The results of an automated platform are not three months stale.
• It provides you with up-to-date knowledge about the vulnerabilities and attack paths present in your organization.
• An updated view of the vulnerabilities allows you to develop a prioritised remediation plan to fix issues ordered by severity.

Conclusion

Automated Penetration Testing platforms like FourCore ATTACK help the organization defend their critical assets against advanced adversaries. Solutions like these help find attack surfaces and paths which can cause the most damage to your organization.