By Nathan Jones Director, Customer Success, Synack
In Formula One, the most prepared teams have the best chances of success. Yet, preparation alone isn’t going to clinch a victory. Many factors contribute to crossing the finish line first: track conditions, weather, car setup, strategy changes and updates, as well as driver skill and decision making.
Penetration testing isn’t any different.
Following all the best practices and preparations laid out in our previous blog about getting ready for pentests like a Formula One champ is key, but you can’t truly succeed without smooth execution and deft management throughout the test.
At Synack, we’ve got you covered throughout the entire engagement on our Crowdsourced Penetration Testing Platform before and after our trusted network of security researchers go to work hunting for your vulnerabilities.
Here’s what to expect throughout the Synack engagement:
- It starts with high-quality, trusted researchers
Your pit team: Researchers’ skills are critically important to the success of any pentest. Because the vulnerability landscape is so broad and diverse, a single researcher — or even a small number of researchers — won’t have expertise across all vulnerability categories to fully test the assets in question.
That’s the value of the Synack crowdsourced testing platform because we attract the best researchers with a wide variety of skills and backgrounds. This allows large numbers of researchers to bring their experience to bear across the range of vulnerability categories, enabling the most thorough test of the assets in scope.
- Results get collected in a well-designed platform
Right car, right tools: A top-quality vulnerability management platform should underpin any pentest initiative, allowing customers to manage the full vulnerability lifecycle from initial reports, to analyst review, and then onto remediation. At Synack, the customer portal lets your team view vulnerabilities flow through a logical, easy-to-use workflow from discovery to patch to patch verification.
In addition, our triage process ensures that vulnerability findings passed to the customer are valid, reproducible, high quality and actionable. This allows the customer to focus efforts on understanding the issues and taking appropriate action, saving considerable time and effort.
- Control the testing environment and parameters
Know the course: Some penetration tests can be intrusive and noisy. The Synack experience has been designed to make the process as simple and seamless as possible. It is carried out in a controlled manner to mitigate any sort of impact to client’s everyday business operations. Researchers work from a known source IP to ensure proper monitoring. Customers are encouraged to monitor activity and traffic during the test but we recommend waiting for a formal vulnerability report before any patching. Patching during a test limits researchers’ ability to validate the finding and reward the researcher.
- Engage with researchers before and after the test
Connected to the pit crew: A testing engagement should not be a fire-and-forget activity. Customers should be looking to provide regular feedback, including information about new releases or changes, areas of scope on which researchers should focus and updates on any customer actions.
Scope changes are a critical area of communication. A class of vulnerabilities caused by the same underlying issue should be temporarily removed from scope to prevent inundating the client with repetitive findings. We do this at Synack because it reduces noise as well as shifts the focus of researchers to other areas, thus ensuring better coverage.
- Augment manual testing with smart automation
Change out the equipment when needed: Penetration testing harnesses human creativity to create value, but automated scanners are an important tool, as well, to help augment human efforts. Too often, however, security teams have had to accept trade offs, investing in cheap self-service scanning solutions to get broad attack surface coverage. There’s a better way. Smarter technologies built on machine learning principles can make a difference and help scale the testing effort. At Synack, SmartScan®, our vulnerability assessment solution, enables, rather than burdens, security teams by scaling security testing and accelerating their vulnerability remediation processes. SmartScan® combines industry-best scanning technology, proprietary risk identification technology, and a crowd of the world’s best security researchers, the Synack Red Team (SRT) for noiseless scanning and high-quality triage.
- Recognize the possibility of unintended consequences
Expect the unexpected: Every pentester and testing company seeks to avoid unwanted impact to the customer. Most issues can be avoided by having an accurate scope and researcher guidelines agreed ahead of testing. On the rare occasion that there is an incident, we have a process in place to deal with it immediately.
- Act on the results
Celebrate your wins, learn from your mistakes: It’s essential that clients act on findings. Just discovering vulnerabilities does not improve an organization’s risk posture. The vulnerabilities should be patched and remediated as soon as possible. Clients should look to monitor and track their risk posture over time using a risk metric such as Synack’s Attacker Resistance Score to chart improvements.
For long-term testing engagements, clients should not wait until the pentest has completed, but should fix issues and receive confirmation from the pentester that the mitigation was successful throughout the test.
Verifying compliance with necessary regulations is also a key part of using the results of a penetration test. Synack strongly recommends that clients opt for a testing package that includes checking compliance, including either relevant OWASP categories, PCI DSS 11.3, and NIST SP 800-53. A testing checklist provides auditable documentation for compliance-driven penetration testing requirements.
- Keep on testing
Always winning: In Formula One, when the race ends, the work isn’t’ over. There are always more races to run and further developments and improvements to make to stay ahead of the pack.
The same is true in pentesting. As adversaries get more advanced, staying one step ahead in their cybersecurity is more important than ever. Regular pentesting is a key component of this. A client is only as strong as their weakest link, making appropriate pentesting against their entire attack surface critical to remaining cyber secure.
Winning looks like an overall reduction in vulnerability risk. While it’s impossible to eliminate all vulnerabilities, a healthy pentesting cadence will strengthen your security posture over time.
Nathan Jones is Director of Client Operations at Synack. He’s also a huge racing fan.
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