PENETRATION TESTING SERVICES
Pentesting and simulated
Cyber Attacks
Engaging cyber expertise in order to discover previously-undetected security vulnerabilities that exist within your company’s technology infrastructure is a mature and well-adopted practice that dates back a number of decades.
CovertSwarm offers the complete spectrum of pentest services ranging from Web Application (WebApp) testing; Infrastructure Assessments; Mobile Application testing; 'Assumed compromise' engagements; Cloud configuration reviews, and much more.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF PENETRATION TESTING
Since the 1960s through to the 90s, the cyber security needs resulting from a relatively glacial rate of technology change within businesses were sufficiently catered for through the engagement of occasional, ‘snap shot’ penetration testing:
A businesses’ chief technology or security officer would appoint an external cyber security consultancy to engage with their onsite IT team, to spend a short amount of time working to analyse an agreed but limited area of their technology estate looking for well-known cyber issues.
Rather than perform a lifelike simulated cyber attack, the consultant’s ‘penetration testing’ would use off-the-shelf cyber vulnerability scanning tools in combination with their own experience to seek to detect well-known configuration issues and basic software coding errors that could result in a cyber vulnerability for the client’s technology infrastructure that may result in a breach of their systems and data, or permit attackers to induce operational downtime.
Once the consultant’s engagement was completed their pen testers would produce a report listing the vulnerabilities they had identified (that they would leave for the in-house team to decipher and the vulnerabilities to remediate), and ask whether the client would like to book a return visit from them in 12 months’ time as they handed them an invoice for their work.
They would then move on to their next client, invariably losing all the knowledge gained during their testing exercise – meaning that next time around it would be another ‘cold start’ and the potential value of their engagement never truly realised by the client.
THE CHALLENGE
Before the world made progress to establishing today’s business norms that rely upon high rates of technology change, automated software delivery pipelines and continuous integration processes, penetration tests being performed only very occasionally by businesses seeking to understand their cyber risk profile made complete sense – the reasoning being ‘if our IT estate hasn’t changed recently then there shouldn’t be any change to its cyber risk profile, and so we should still be safe.’
TIMES HAVE CHANGED
Times have changed, the business world moves faster by orders of magnitude now compared to a decade ago, and legacy penetration testing is no longer enough to maintain the security of commerce.
FAST-PACED TECHNOLOGY
The mentality that once bought into traditional pentests that continue to provide a ‘snapshot’ view of a slow-moving technology estate made sense 20 years ago. But the days where the only significant changes to a business’s cyber risk profile would come from newly-discovered vulnerabilities in their otherwise static applications and technologies are far behind us all.
OUTDATED PRACTICES
The challenge is that most modern penetration testing consultancies have failed to keep up with these changing times and are still offering the same services their predecessors did over 40 years ago.
A modern, competitive economy thrives through continuous technology change and innovation that drives efficiency, insight and advantage through its iterative application. It is increasingly common for businesses to perform multiple technology changes to their estates each day; with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors, and technology platform hosting companies now publishing incremental changes to their software multiple times per minute.
LEGACY SNAPSHOTS
The legacy ‘snapshot’ penetration test no longer makes sense: by the time the pentester’s analysis is complete, their report is written and it appearing in your inbox, your technology estate will have incurred a multitude of changes that instantly result in the pentest report being out of date. They are reporting yesterday's news.
Testing a technology estate once every 6 to 12 months, when your business demands that its constituent technology components change far more frequently, means that traditional penetration testing has had its day and is no longer fit for sustaining a low-risk, high-assurance cyber security health status for your business.
OUR EXPERT APPROACH
CovertSwarm’s expert approach to addressing the cyber risk gap that traditional penetration testing leaves between its ad-hoc ‘snapshot’ reports, is revolutionary:
By aligning dedicated, expert, full-time ethical hackers to each of our client’s accounts, we avoid the risk of ‘generic testing’ by getting to know your business, your people and the technologies that drive its competitive advantage and never stepping away.
24/7 ENGAGEMENT
Through 24/7/365 engagement, our swarm of ethical hackers seek to detect, prove and support the remediation of cyber vulnerabilities that we constantly search for within your technology estate. Rather than focusing on searching only for known ‘in the wild’ cyber issues, our team of experts share their knowledge between one another – and cross-client accounts - to detect and exploit unknown ‘zero day’ vulnerabilities that reside deep within our client’s technology stacks.
UNCOVER TRUE RISKS
CovertSwarm’s balanced approach to researching, detecting, proving and rapidly alerting our clients to cyber issues detected within their broad commercial systems ensures that our simulated cyber attacks uncover true risks that could lead to serious reputational damage for their brands. We provide the assurance to our clients that any vulnerability we alert them to at any time is the one they know they need to focus on remediating due to the genuine risk it poses to their business.
REDUCE NOISE
As we know your business, understand your technologies and have established professional relationships with your teams, we always add value through our engagement by ensuring the we reduce the ‘noise’ of cyber reports and always direct remediation and education towards addressing reducing your personalised cyber risk status.
Modern 24/7 businesses demand modern 24/7 cyber security, and CovertSwarm is proud to offer the first ‘friendly’ rogue cyber service that is dedicated to constantly compromising the security of its clients: all with the aim of continuously enhancingtheir cyber security status through our constant and rapid detection of their previously-undetected cyber vulnerabilities.
Could your organisation benefit from:
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Continuous cyber security
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Ethical hacker-led cyber research
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Rapid vulnerability detection
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Instant alerting to discovered issues that could result in breach of your systems
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Engaging with a cyber team who thrives on hunting for ‘Zero Day’ vulnerabilities unique to your estate
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Assurance that your technology team is focusing on remediation ‘genuine’ cyber risks and not losing velocity by remediating low-risk cyber ‘noise’
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Software Engineering efficiencies gained through continuous cyber education
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Access to a dedicated CovertSwarm ethical hacker who is backed by a Hive of cyber specialists to answer all your cyber queries
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Enhanced ‘first time right’ code quality and resulting product delivery velocity
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The ability to direct where, how and when our ‘Swarm’ of ethical hackers research and attack within your business – including phishing tests, social exploitation, simulated cyber attack and more.
Yes?…then get in touch today.
CovertSwarm exists to constantly compromise the security of our clients, and by doing so we provide a modern approach to helping them increase their cyber maturity and defences.
