What is penetration testing?

Who knows more about security than those who are able to breach it? The thief who gets the jewel from the museum must have utilized some flaw in the security system that no one recognized before and the hacker that steals data or plants a virus does so thanks to a cyber vulnerability that slipped through the cracks.

While thievery and hacking are harmful to any business that falls victim to a security vulnerability, the one upside they produce is bringing that same vulnerability out into the open. It’s an odd cycle: Without thieves and hackers, you wouldn’t need cybersecurity, but falling prey to them makes you aware of the threats you face. Once your system has been hacked one way, it’s up to you to do your due diligence and analyze the vulnerabilities they took advantage of. After fixing them, any other hacker that comes along will need to find a new approach to slow you down.

That’s why, in a roundabout way, hackers and thieves are performing penetration tests. By breaking into your system, they reveal the flaws that you might have missed, and the result is stronger security for the future. But not everyone capable of breaking into your system means to do you harm. Why allow dangerous individuals to break into your system when you could authorize experts and professionals to penetrate your operations with the purpose of locating vulnerabilities and helping you resolve them?

Now we’ve arrived at the essence of penetration testing, otherwise called pen testing. True pen testing isn’t just an action, it’s an intention. While thieves and hackers want to harm you, pen testers want to help you stay ahead of threats technologically. To meet this goal, they use all the tools in their cyber arsenal to see if and how they can break into your system – not to steal or cause harm, but to come up with ways to make your system safer.

That’s why pen testers like those at GRSee don’t just hack into your system and prove that you have a vulnerability, they show you what they did and how they got in before recommending ways to fix the issues that were found.

What better way to beat the hackers than to think like them and use their weapons against them? As long as cyber assets continue to grow in importance, ill-intentioned individuals will try to find vulnerabilities to benefit from. The best way to get ahead of them is to simulate an attack on your system before a real one can take place.