Nearly 80% of people worry about their personal information getting purloined by computer hackers. A recent report revealed that hackers are become more active during quarantine days and stealing people’s personal information to earn money from them.

You have seen in the news about cyber attacks every day, but do you know how they hack websites? It is easy to hack your website or system and steal relevant information about you and your customer to use for their profits. This would help them to start their website using your website and customer. It is risky for you if they misuse the website and get caught online police can take you in remand rather than hackers.

A penetration test will help out in a critical situation. You can find hackers and methods to resolve the matter without revealing your personal information. Read further to know more about penetration tests.

What is a penetration test?

A penetration test is also known as ethical hacking and white hat hacking. It solves the problem to find and fix security flaws in your website and web applications. It will work before stealing your data from hackers so your data can be safely available on the website.

How its work

With your permission, a cyber security pro imitates a real-world cyber-attack on your website. Cyber security uses the same tools and techniques to find out the invaders and demonstrate the business impacts of weaknesses in a website.

The penetration tester shares the details with you, which is helpful to plug up any security holes in your website.

What are the types of penetration testing?

• Network services

It identifies the most exposed vulnerabilities and security weaknesses in the servers, firewalls, switches, printers, and workstations. It is helpful to protect your business from common network-based attacks.

• Web application

It is used to discover the vulnerabilities and security weaknesses in web applications.

• Wireless

With this, we can identify and examine the connections between all the devices connected to the businesses’ WIFI.

• Physical penetration test

The penetration tester attempts to compromise physical barriers to access a business’s infrastructure.  

• Social engineering

It attempts to convince users into giving them sensitive information like password and username of website id.

• Client slide

It is used for penetrating client slide applications to discover vulnerabilities and security weaknesses.

Who performs a penetration test?

Pen testers perform penetration tests to identify the security weaknesses in your website. Penetration test performs by the cyber security cops or any ethical hackers who have formal training in the technical system. Some pen testers are self-taught in this field and can help you to secure your website data. Examples include EC-Council's Certified Ethical Hacker and CompTIA’s PenTest+.

What are common website vulnerabilities?

White hat hackers may look for various types of security flaws when they do pen-testing. Here are the five common web application vulnerabilities according to the open web application security project:

• Broken access control

In this method, the users should not have access to the website or web application that is relevant to make it secure and can only be accessed by an authorized employee.

• Cryptographic failures

It clarifies that your sensitive data is not stored and transmitted properly on web applications and websites. It includes credit card details, passwords, personal information, and id.

• Insecure design

It means design flaws could leave your business vulnerable on the website. The code used for creating the website hasn’t been tested against known hacking methods.

• Security misconfiguration

Your business website may be highly configurable but some customization could let attackers compromise your site.

How vulnerable is your website?

Numerous websites are vulnerable to hackers. Those sites are certainly run on content management system platforms like WordPress tend to be more targeted than others because they are prevalent and their codes are publicly accessible.

After getting knowledge about penetration tests, you are curious to know about your website. Pen testing may be mandatory to comply with rules and regulations. But if your website has not to penetrate tested, you need to protect your customers and your personal information. Find a pen tester from Workdeed and start your system penetration tests to secure your sensitive data.