Being hacked is never viewed as a good thing. Nobody likes their data being stolen and leaked. Nobody actually wants to be hacked, or do they? The past has shown that after a company is hacked their security awareness increases and overall security actually gets better.
So how do we increase overall security and security awareness for an organization without them being hacked. Training? Books? Videos? Those are all good options, but I don’t think those options will have the same affect as actually being hacked. So what do we do then? Well, how about we hack them?! Hack them the same way a malicious hacker would, but legally under the consent of the company.
Lessons learned from a penetration test
Giving someone full permission to try to hack your company is essentially a penetration test. Here are just a few of the things you will learn from a full penetration test:
- What information an attack could acquire about your company without even compromising your systems. Learning this will raise awareness on how much information your company is sharing that can aid an attacker.
- Where your systems are most vulnerable and which areas are the highest risk. Which will help you better secure these areas and help prevent malicious attacks.
- How much information and data an attack can access once they have compromised a system. This knowledge will cause management to re-think the way they are storing sensitive information on company computers.
- How an attacker can use social-engineering and psychology to trick employees to perform actions or release information they normally wouldn’t. This is one of the most common ways people are hacked lately. Knowing how to recognize these sort of attacks is invaluable and a skill all employees should have.
There are more threats and vulnerabilities every day. There seems to be another big data breach in the news all the time. Security is a huge concern for everyone. Nobody wants to get hacked and have their brand and reputation potentially ruined. So lets fight fire with fire by hiring nice hackers to hack your company before the bad hackers do!
In the weeks to come I will be bringing you through different techniques that attackers use and how to help protect against them.
Stay Tuned!