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The industry of software development is becoming vibrant with every passing day. The software has become an important and irreplaceable part of almost every industry. You can easily observe software running behind every app and online platform. There are lots of steps before the software is finally launched. However, the last step has the most importance. It is known as the testing phase. For this phase, every software company or any enterprise, be it banking, or health, airline, or commerce, has to shake hands with a pen testing company and hand over the software so they can ensure it is penetration proof.

Why Does Your Software Need to be Tested?

Lots of software companies design a software development plan before they start writing code. This plan includes constant testing as well so whenever a chunk of code is done, developers test it to ensure whether it is working fine or not. This gives them the impression that they do not need pen testing services from any other company. Do you think they are right to believe that?

We ensure that they are completely wrong to think that way! Pen testing companies house dozens of professional and experienced testers whose daily job is to look at different codes and bring out errors, bugs, and issues for developers to fix. Developers can only discover a limited number of bugs. However, testers can highlight as many bugs as are present in the code. Here are some of the benefits of getting your software tested by a pen testing company.

Evade Penalties by Meeting Security Requirements

Every IT department using or developing software has to address the overall auditing and compliance requirements procedures. These compliance procedures include HIPAA, SARBANES, and GLBA. Once a software goes for pen testing, it comes out with a report mentioning all the features and functionalities violating auditing and compliance requirements. This helps the development team in eradicating issues to save themselves from paying any sort of penalties.

Avoid Security Threats

Penetration testing companies can easily detect loopholes that can become responsible for security issues later on. The report we talked about earlier also mentions all the security threats and the health of the software so developers can make it better. This aids in making software strong and difficult to tap in.

Good Network Downtime

Coming face to face with a security flaw, managing to escape it, and then recovering from it takes a lot of time. The penetration testing companies help each software company define recuperation strategies that would help them recover. These strategies can include IT remediation efforts, retention plans and programs, customer protection, legal activities, and a lot more. Moreover, they help to avoid this long procedure by putting up good security walls.

Apart from the three most famous benefits mentioned above, having a penetration company at your back comes with a lot more benefits. They improve the return on investment, keep your security up-to-date, and help your business become better with betterments in your software. However, have you ever wondered what stages does a software goes through to become pen-testing approved?

Stages of Penetration Testing

Penetration testing is a huge process that includes a lot of small procedures. While the majority of the people know this as a process, only a few are aware of the sub-processes going on under this name. Here are the activities that every pen testing company performs on your software and app before approving it:

Laying Down a Plan

Every procedure starts with the planning stage and pen testing is no different. At this stage, the team of testers sit together with developers and define the scope and goals of the testing activity. This defines the systems they would be using to test the functionalities and features of the software. By the end of this stage, they do some intelligence research by finding different details about the requirements and possible vulnerabilities.

Scanning Thoroughly

At this step, testers make multiple attempts to bring down the security checks of the software by faking attacks. This helps them understand how the software responds to intrusions. There are further different ways to accomplish this step that depend on the requirements of the software company.

Gaining Access

If we talk about reality, every attack is meant to gain access to the software to accomplish whatever plans the attacker has. So at this stage, testers try to gain access to the software by using web application attacks like cross-site scripting, backdoors, and SQL injection. This provides them insights about the possible vulnerabilities and helps developers cover them. This also gives the company an idea about what sort of drawbacks they might have to face given the attacks become successful.

Keeping Access

Once an attacker gains access to your system, his next is always to maintain it to do his work before you can plan to rescue. So testers follow the footsteps of the attackers and try to maintain the access by failing the recovery systems. This stage helps testers discover if the vulnerability discovered can be used to maintain a persistent presence in the exploited system. This copies the footsteps of the advanced attacks that can stay hidden in systems for months and can access all sensitive information.

Analysis Report

This is the last stage of the whole penetration testing procedure. Once the software is tested for all vulnerabilities and the tester is sure about the flaws and perfections, he composes an analysis report. The report contains details about all the success and unsuccessful hacks, vulnerabilities discovered, ways to imitate every attack, suggestions to avoid those attacks, and a few final remarks. Moreover, it also contains the sensitive information the pen tester was able to steal and the amount of time he could maintain access.

Conclusion

Penetration testing companies help every software and app development company see the flaws and aids them in fixing too. These companies are the only force that is stopping hackers from hurting businesses and customers. Indeed, without the support and aid of pen testing companies, every software house would find it difficult to win battles against cybercriminals and their threats.