Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing for SMBs
January 11, 2022Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) is a technical assessment process to find security bugs in a software program or a computer network. It is a systematic review of security weaknesses in an information system. It evaluates if the system is susceptible to any known vulnerabilities, assigns severity levels to those vulnerabilities, and recommends remediation or mitigation, if and whenever needed.
Either an enterprise or a start-up, businesses of all kinds are now choosing to outsource IT services for many different reasons. Some of the key advantages that start-ups can achieve when outsourcing their IT Services.
In these days of widespread Internet usage and the effectiveness of WFH, security is becoming of prime concern either for an individual or for organizations. The almost universal use of mobile and Web applications makes systems vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Vulnerability assessment can help identify the loopholes in a system while penetration testing is a proof-of-concept approach to actually explore and exploit a vulnerability.
Types of vulnerability assessments
- Host assessment – The assessment of critical servers, which may be vulnerable to attacks if not adequately tested or not generated from a tested machine image.
- Network and wireless assessment – The assessment of policies and practices to prevent unauthorized access to private or public networks and network-accessible resources.
- Database assessment – The assessment of databases or big data systems for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, identifying rogue databases or insecure dev/test environments, and classifying sensitive data across an organization’s infrastructure.
- Application scans – The identifying of security vulnerabilities in web applications and their source code by automated scans on the front-end or static/dynamic analysis of source code.
Why SMBs should prioritize investing in cybersecurity measures?
- 3 in 4 Indian firms saw 25% rise in cyber threats during WFH. Based on an AIG report, SMBs are targets of business email compromise, followed by ransomware attacks — both of which are a direct hit on their business. In fact, according to Reuters, ransomware attacks are causing an increase of 25 per cent in premiums on cyber insurance rates for SMBs.
- According to the National Cyber Security Alliance, about 60 per cent of small and medium businesses (SMBs) are hacked, yet, there is a disconnect between the reality and requirements for SMBs when it comes to cybersecurity.
- One in five SMBs don’t use any end-point security protections, and 46 per cent of SMBs, with less than 1000 employees had five to 16 hours of breach-related downtime in 2019.
- A Verizon Data Breach Investigations report suggests about 40 per cent of cyber-attacks are targeted at SMBs that amounting to over $188,000 in loss per attack, on average.
The rushed and incomplete nature of the IT structure and Operations sphere brought these gaping holes in the cyber risk postures of MSMEs and Startups and this is becoming an advantage for hackers to prefer.