A number of industries require penetration testing as part of cybersecurity regulation compliance. A professional penetration test, or pen test, can be costly, and presents its own risks to your company. White hat hackers can help you identify critical weaknesses in your cybersecurity. But hiring the wrong pen tester can be catastrophic for your business, and finding a reputable pen test provider can take a lot of time and money.
What is Pen Testing?
A vulnerability scan looks for known weaknesses in your network security, and provides a report on the number and severity of weaknesses it finds. Pen testing goes one step further by actually exploiting these weaknesses to assess how much damage a malicious hacker could do once they’ve broken into your network. Pen testing typically involves heavy vetting of the white hat hacker being hired and the signing of confidentiality agreements to ensure data exposed during the pen test is never shared externally.
What Kinds of Businesses Need Regular Pen Testing?
Penetration testing is a great way to fully assess risk and identify network vulnerabilities for any business. But it’s not a necessity for every company. If your industry or government contracts require regular pen testing as part of your cybersecurity compliance, then you will want to find a trusted pen test provider. Even if you are not explicitly required to pen test, it can provide support for the risk assessment portion of cybersecurity frameworks and regulations like NIST and HIPAA.
Pen testing is particularly important for businesses in:
- Finance
- Payment Services
- Technology
- Healthcare
- And any business with government contracts
Qualified Test Providers
When selecting a pen test company, it’s important to thoroughly vet your options. The average manual pen test, conducted by a qualified white hat hacker, is over $10,000. For small businesses, the expense of a pen test is cost-prohibitive, and may lead small business owners to work with less reputable providers.
Our Solution for Small Businesses: vPenTest
Digital Agent’s vPenTest is automated by Vonahi Security, a third-party security company. This allows us to deliver an impartial assessment of our clients’ network security and our own security protocols. Threat actors are constantly testing your network in an attempt to access, manipulate, damage and sell valuable data and systems in your organization. vPenTesting finds potential weaknesses in your network and allows us to address those vulnerabilities before hackers find them – at a fraction of the cost of a manual pen test.
For answers on pen testing and all things compliance, contact your Digital Agent.
Kate Lewis
Technical Writer & Content Strategist
Digital Agent
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