5 Essential Skills for Advanced Penetration Testing

Penetration testing is also known as pen testing, is a practice that identifies loopholes in an application that can be exploited with the aim of finding security vulnerabilities that a hacker could use against it. Pen testing is different from vulnerability scanning and security assessments. It helps in identifying some of the most complicated attacks across systems. When you hire a penetration testing company, testers use tools and techniques to identify vulnerabilities that teams are unable to detect during the software development process. 

It is often used to detect the vectors that can be used by attackers to recreate the attack and prevent it from being attacked in the future. It is a major component of various security audits that include PCI-DSS regulation. These audits require pen-tests on active systems and apps that handle payment information. Pen-testers use a combination of manual and automated testing, by using a variety of tools that are a part of the ethical hacking process. 

Internal security teams conduct a risk analysis of their systems, apps, and networks to secure them and help businesses in protecting their systems from cyber-attacks. The highly trained pen-testers think like unethical hackers and employ creative ways to identify vulnerabilities before attackers can misuse them. They go beyond using automated tools to identify these risks. Pen-testers are known as ethical hackers who can also simulate phishing campaigns to identify weaknesses in the security posture of the companies. Here, human intervention and skills are essential to simulate realistic attacks to uncover all the critical weaknesses in a system.

Let’s have a look at the 5 essential skills for advanced penetration testing:

• As the name itself suggests, penetration testing is all about penetrating into a system to check its security, pen-testers go beyond the available suite of tools to spot the possible vulnerabilities. Testers should:
• Understand how to secure web communications. They should know everything about registering the web domain name and applying the same to a cloud-IP address. 
• Pen-testers should secure web communication by generating secure domain certificates. 
• They should also have the ability to script or write code 
• Ethical hackers should have effective report writing skills. 

In order to be a better penetration tester, it is important to upgrade skills in their domain. These skills will make them stand out from the rest and make them more effective pen testers. Although when businesses hire a penetration testing company they are sure that they have a secure system. Good pen-testers know how to maintain a proper security stature for business and seal all the loopholes in a system. This allows businesses to be sure that attackers cannot misuse any vulnerabilities in their apps, networks, and systems. The above-mentioned skill is important for pen-testers to excel at their jobs and think like an unethical hacker before they can attack a system. Cybersecurity is evolving continuously, and it makes penetration testing an important process for organizations to invest in and stay safe from malicious attackers. 

 Author Bio:

As a Senior Marketing Consultant at Kualitatem, Ray Parker loves to write tech-related news, articles, specifically quality assurance and information security. Apart from his techie appearance, he enjoys soccer, reading mysteries, and spending long hours working over at the New York office.