How can we find reliable security testing services?

How can we find reliable security testing services?

My employees do not have security experts. Is it meaningful to rely on the security testing service?

 

In the absence of security experts among employees, you are likely to select a vendor from the external security testing service. It is too expensive and time-consuming to develop internal security skills, which is not an ideal choice. This skill will continue to improve over time.

Because relying on external partners may be the only viable option, the main considerations for third-party security testing services include:

◆ Understand the application attack surface of an organization

◆ Solve budget problems

◆ In-depth Test Analysis

◆ Determine the analysis frequency

Application attack surface

First, it is important to understand the scope of the test. Some questions need to be answered by security testers. If how many applications need to be tested, where are they hosted and who developed them? The project manager should also be prepared to answer questions about risk levels. These questions include: Which applications manage the most sensitive data, which are responsible for the most valuable operations, and which represent the greatest risks? These levels will help optimize test activities. If you do not answer these questions, your in-depth decision-making may abuse your resources.

Budget

The original budget may be strictly controlled on the test project. Especially in small enterprises that do not have internal development forecasts, budget may be the most important issue. Evaluating external vendors within the budget can help quickly narrow down the field, especially when you decide to adopt deep test analysis.

Deep Analysis

All evaluation and test activities are not the same. When evaluating the third method testing service, it is important to know which tests will be conducted. This determines the security-level insights that the evaluation will provide.

When the static test is idle, view the application code or binary file. Dynamic Testing checks the running system and performs tests to determine, or tries to determine the behavior of the current vulnerability. Automatic Analysis, such as static and dynamic tests, relies only on tools to match the code pattern or request with the response.

Automatic Analysis is relatively inexpensive, but it also has some limitations. For example, automated testing can only identify some specific types of vulnerabilities, but it cannot determine which vulnerabilities depend on the application's business context environment. In addition to the false negative rate introduced due to the limitations of automatic analysis, automated security testing can identify false positives. In this case, the analysis may be a vulnerability that has not been exploited.

Manual analysis is expensive because it relies on security analysts to perform tests. This increases the identifiable probability of the vulnerability type, so it is feasible to manually test and filter out false positives. However, complicated manual testing costs may be a hindrance, even for organizations with a large amount of resources.

Analysis frequency

Security prospects have been changing, and the most important applications are usually active development. Security testing is not a one-time action.

Using External testing organizations or services is the most common strategy for non-large organizations and small businesses as long as they need to introduce security testing features and skills. However, it is important to ensure that these organizations fully understand what tests will be performed as expected. In addition, understanding the attack level and application risk level of the Organization helps to ensure optimal allocation of test predictions.