What Will Penetration Testing Be Like in The Next 50 Years?

What Will Penetration Testing Be Like in The Next 50 Years?

In Brief:

• In the 21st century, our reality is shocking as the chances of any business eventually getting hacked are high and concerningly rising.
• This leaves the organizations with only two choices: Either protecting their digital assets through penetration testing or first getting hacked and then hiring a holistic cyber security centre to clean up the mess.
• Half of internal-facing web application vulnerabilities are considered high risk.
• High-risk vulnerabilities are present on the network perimeters of 84% of companies.
• Smaller organizations (1–250 employees) have the highest targeted malicious email rate at 1 in 323.

What is Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing is also considered ‘ethical hacking’. You can understand it as a practice of checking for vulnerabilities on a web, network, computer, or web application that may arise. A pen test is conducted to determine the risk factor and the security level that these digital assets require.

• 86.2% organizations were affected cyberattack
• 93% deal with rogue cloud apps
• 30% of phishing attacks involve keyloggers
• 70% of companies compromised with major incident

The Evolution of Penetration Testing

It is noteworthy that over a decade penetration testing has evolved to efficiently fight rising cyber threats and potential risks.

The major factors fuelling the web application penetration testing among the market include:

• The increasing rigid regulations and compliances demanding regular penetration testing practices
• The rising complexity of cyberattacks leading to financial and reputational losses for businesses
• The excessive use of digital devices resulted in a surge in mobile and web-based business-critical applications. This led to the growth of web application penetration testing all over the globe.

Coming to talk about what the future holds for Penetration testing web applications; it is safe to say that the rising trends of penetration testing as a service would provide lucrative opportunities.

How? well, that is to be discussed next:

Following are the types of Penetration Testing

• Wireless
• Network
• Social Engineering
• Physical
• Firewall
• Web Application

The Future of Penetration Testing – Automation or strategy?

• 95% of cybersecurity breaches are caused by human error.

The new cyber security experts suggest that automation would take some space in aiding the penetration testing services. This is because automation is presumed to be helpful in minimizing potential human error.

Strategic Penetration Testing is the Future

However, the traditional cyber security experts beg to differ from this standpoint.

• Automation can aid but only till a certain point.
• Even with automation, an expert is required to oversee and execute the operation at every level.

Now, the challenge is, traditional penetration testing can’t catch up with the evolving risks and adversaries of the business agility as well as hacker’s goals.

The Final Word

• While the primary purpose of penetration testing is to expose vulnerabilities, it’s important to note that the main goal of a pen test is often tied to a business objective – which further required the overarching strategy.
• As far as the future of penetration testing is concerned, we believe it must continuously innovate to keep pace with hackers and attackers.