We at Bulletproof provide a range of different cyber security services, including penetration tests, managed SIEM, and compliance consultancy. Though undoubtedly the most interesting (and cool) service we offer are our red team assessments.
Nowadays, high-profile security breaches continue to dominate the media headlines. This trend places an increasing number of businesses at risk. They are growing in amount and complexity while malicious hackers are actively developing new and more sophisticated forms of attacks every single day.
You’ll often find that ‘vulnerability scan’ and ‘penetration test’ are wrongly used interchangeably, creating confusion about which is the right security choice for businesses. Broadly speaking, a vulnerability scan could be thought of as a surface-level security assessment, whereas a penetration test delves that much deeper. In fact, penetration testers often make use of a vulnerability scan as part of their process.
Last week, we spoke about the common issues that come up throughout a penetration test. We left out what many of our penetration testers think of as the ‘biggest issues’, however, as the finished article rivalled Dickens at his wordiest. Still, they’re definitely worth raising, as some of the most common issues that emerge from a penetration test don’t involve misconfigurations, vulnerabilities or hacking of any kind.
It amazes me how many people confuse the importance of vulnerability scanning with penetration testing. Vulnerability scanning cannot replace the importance of penetration testing, and penetration testing on its own cannot secure the entire network. Both are important at their respective levels, needed in cyber risk analysis and are required by standards such as PCI, HIPAA and ISO 27001.
To deliver technology products and services, companies use multiple technology environments so that changes, updates, and testing can be completed in a controlled way without interrupting customer experience. This is a best practice approach that maintains high levels of system stability, uptime and security. These “non-production”, or test environments should ideally be completely disconnected from production environments to prevent security incidents and bugs.
We live in an age where cyber security threats are (or at least should be) at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Very recently, British Airways suffered a huge security breach that led to over 300,000 payment cards being compromised, showing that even the big players can still get hacked if they’re not 100% vigilant.
The digital world has become a dangerous place. It’s like the Wild West (the movie kind, not the real kind, which was decidedly less wild than it’s portrayed), with outlaws out to do you harm and make off with your precious data. Fortunately, like any good western, there are also honour-bound gun slingers seeking to bring law, order and – most importantly – security to the digital landscape.
Today, I will be going over Control 20 from version 7 of the top 20 CIS Controls – Penetration Tests and Red Team Exercises. I will go through the eight requirements and offer my thoughts on what I’ve found.
