X-Force Red is an autonomous team of veteran hackers within IBM Security that is hired to break into organizations and uncover risky vulnerabilities that criminal attackers may use for personal gain. Our team recently unveiled new statistics collected from its penetration testing engagements. One statistic that stood out, although not surprisingly, was that out of 1, phishing emails sent to employees within five organizations from October to November , people clicked on the malicious link inside the email and people submitted valid credentials. While those numbers do not appear significantly high, they still show that criminals had unique opportunities to move around inside a target organization and access sensitive data. And considering one set of valid credentials is all it might take for a criminal to launch an attack, of them is a gold mine. These security mistakes are the types of vulnerabilities that can be identified by penetration testers.
The difference between Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing | Acunetix
Both are valuable tools that can benefit any information security program and they are both integral components of a Threat and Vulnerability Management process. The two are often incorrectly used interchangeably due to marketing hype and other influences which has created confusion and wasted resources for many enterprises. With that in mind, I'd like to try to clarify the distinctions between vulnerability assessments and pen tests and hopefully eliminate some of the confusion. It is an in-depth evaluation of your information security posture, indicating weaknesses as well as providing the appropriate mitigation procedures required to either eliminate those weaknesses or reduce them to an acceptable level of risk. Using many tools and techniques, the penetration tester ethical hacker attempts to exploit critical systems and gain access to sensitive data. Depending on the scope, a pen test can expand beyond the network to include social engineering attacks or physical security tests.
The terms Vulnerability Assessments and Penetration Tests are often incorrectly used interchangeably due to marketing hype and casual use by non-experts. Regulatory requirements and vendor management expectations also exacerbate this issue as they will often call for penetration tests when vulnerability assessments are better suited for the particular organization. In reality, the best test for an organization will depend all on the end goal.
In the world of cybersecurity, nothing is static. The cyber threat environment is dynamic and evolving. There are new vulnerabilities discovered on a daily basis.