Why do Enterprises Need Cybersecurity Testing?

The digital transformation initiatives taken by enterprises to ensure better customer traction, monitoring, efficiency, productivity, quality, cost savings, and customer experiences have become commonplace. For enterprises, going online has its perks, especially during the pandemic where employees, clients, vendors, and others are able to connect and work with each other remotely. However, the scattered workforces working with or without security hacks are vulnerable to various threat actors and their machinations.

Further, since a large number of enterprises have their databases and other resources located in the cloud, ensuring their security in real-time has become a major challenge. A robust cybersecurity strategy is what is needed to stay a step ahead of cybercriminals. In view of the post-pandemic work environment, enterprises are expected to settle for a hybrid workforce where some employees may work from the office, some from their homes, and the rest shuffling between the office and home. This shift of work pattern would demand a review of cybersecurity assessment to combat any emerging threat scenario. In other words, people in the digital ecosystem should have a zero trust approach to security. They must verify everything before connecting to digital resources using multi-authentication protocols.

Cybersecurity risks and challenges in the 21st century

With sophisticated technology enabling the real digital age, there is an increased risk of it being compromised by cybercriminals. According to Cybercrime Magazine, cybercrime is going to cost the global economy a mindboggling 6 trillion dollars in 2021 out of which the cost of ransomware alone would be 20 billion dollars. The various risks involved with cybersecurity include:

5G network and IoT: With the rollout of the 5G network, internet communication will take a quantum leap. When drawing an analogy with 4G LTE, which itself is quite a leap over 3G, 5G is expected to be delivering peak data rates at speeds of up to 20 Gbps compared to 100 – 300 Mbps for 4G. These ultra-high speeds will give a boost to devices that are part of the IoT ecosystem. However, given the relatively recent origins of 5G, cybercriminals are expected to target IoT devices of the network by exploiting the vulnerabilities. This way they can get entry into networks and gain access to critical pieces of data and information. So, to prevent any resident vulnerability from being exploited by threat actors, application security testing should be made a part of the entire value chain. Also, the manufacturers of such devices having embedded software should integrate cybersecurity testing methods into the architecture.

Cloud-based vulnerabilities: With the pandemic forcing enterprises and institutions to embrace remote working and learning, the role of the cloud infrastructure has become critical. People are using cloud-based resources in the form of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and DaaS to make remote working a possibility. So, with such a large-scale migration of resources to the cloud, cybercriminals are following suit. They are looking for vulnerabilities, indifferent or compromised employees, and a prevailing lackadaisical culture towards security to wreak havoc. Hence, every cloud-based resource being accessed by enterprises should be subjected to stringent application security testing instead of merely depending on measures provided by the service providers.

Artificial Intelligence and cybersecurity: Artificial Intelligence or AI can detect familiar data patterns and outliers in humongous sets of data. AI-enabled cybersecurity systems can identify new attacks and notify the concerned departments of any data breach immediately. AI-based systems can help build automated security systems, face detection suites, and automatic threat detection mechanism. No wonder AI is going to become an integral component of cybersecurity testing across industries.

Brute force DDoS attacks: Cybercriminals are aware of the devastating impact of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in compromising corporate networks. In fact, the second half of 2020 saw a 12% surge in such attacks among those using SSDP and SNMP protocols. Threat actors are using botnet swarms to overwhelm enterprise networks and slow down response times. And since SNMP network protocols connect corporate devices such as switches, modems, printers, routers, and servers, the risk to enterprise security is the maximum. Hence, penetration testing services should be used in such networks or for that matter any network to detect existing loopholes and prevent any potential cyber-attack.

Conclusion

With digital transformation being increasingly adopted by enterprises, malicious actors are finding newer ways to compromise systems and cause data breaches. So, to combat threats from existing or emerging vectors, enterprises need to embrace cutting-edge cybersecurity testing services. These may include deploying agile and effective measures, tools, and techniques.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality