Although organizations strengthen their security ties, yet attackers work harder. However, a pen testing company suggests that most of the organizations are making progress in securing their systems against cyber attacks. They gather aggregated data from penetration tests and red team engagements to highlight the vulnerabilities that companies rectify to secure their networks, systems, and applications. With the help of their external and internal assessments, pen testing companies highlight that although organizational networks continue to depict multiple weaknesses, thus, attackers may have a hard time identifying and exploiting them from outside the network.
Security organizations face big huge challenges that result in complex security hygiene, patch management, password quality and lack of visibility. Thus, the attackers are forced to change their tactics and employ malware-free, approaches to conceal malicious activities. It is due to the exploitation of the environment, now organizations need tools and technology to observe normal system functions to determine if they are being used maliciously.
The pen-tests engagements are performed to see all the similarities it could find across enterprise networks. Data from hundreds of pen-tests showed that accounts with weak and easily identifiable passwords are one of the biggest problems for most of the organizations. Other common vulnerabilities and attack vectors include weaknesses related to authentication, excessive file system permissions, inadequate network segmentation, and improper access control. A pen testing company uses all these techniques to make the most of their security strengthening efforts.
Pen testing firms face many issues that include out-of-date software, one of the most commonly present threats in organizations where they conduct pen tests. They discovered that password issues were a big problem, including patch management, insecure protocols, and configuration protocols. There were a few internally focused engagements, firms found that most vulnerabilities and exploits were simply because most internal environments were Windows-based. It remains one of the most popular techniques for attackers to gain access to this operating system. It also found out that other pen-testing firms also suggest that organizations should tighten their security controls.
No matter how many challenges a pen testing company faces, the pen-testers find new ways to counterfeit the cyber-attacks. Enterprise security remains the topmost issue for organizations that pen tests seem to be addressing slowly, but they are effective. It is also important to keep in mind the fundamental factors including password management, network segmentation, and legacy systems. So, one of the major issues that organizations still need to work through is strengthening their security ties. Many organizations spend millions on security tools and have kept adding them. This has given organizations a chance to have a large number of pen-testing tools that can be used to exploit system vulnerabilities. Pen-testers put efforts to make the most of their software testing activities and help organizations succeed in protecting their systems and networks from cyber-threats. So according to the pen-testing firms, the vulnerabilities and attack vendors they commonly face remain mostly the same regardless of the organization‘s size.