WHY VAPT?

The Covid pandemic has changed the way IT companies used to work. Employees are now working from home most of the times. The job of cybercriminal became more easy. The number of cyber-attacks and threats increased significantly and became more sophisticated. Every minutes two or three cyberattacks are happening and, on average 2,800 attacks per day. Cyber security now becomes a major concern for enterprise as well as small businesses.

VAPT – Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing with IT Audit will help you to stay safe from various cyberattacks. VAPT and IT Audit together will assist you to find open vulnerabilities and security related gaps in your organization. After VAPT and IT Audit exercise you’ll have holistic view of your organization’s cyber security posture. This will further help you to close all the vulnerabilities and security gaps.

Let’s first find out what is VAPT?

Things You Should Know About VAPT – Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing.

What is VAPT?

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) describes a broad range of security assessment services designed to identify and help address cyber security exposures across an organization's IT assets.

VAPT exercise consists of several testing methodologies like by automated vulnerability assessment, penetration testing by skilled experts.

VAPT is more comprehensive exercise.

VAPT exercise starts with vulnerability scanning by automated tools. It is mainly targeted for websites, web applications and internal IT infrastructure devices. Post vulnerability assessment, penetration activity starts by certified experts. They generally identify the false positive and filter out actual vulnerability and then try to exploit it using ethical hacking techniques.

By VAPT, it’s easier to discover and mitigate critical vulnerabilities across platforms and software types, even third-party ones.

We follow best industry standards like OWASP 2021. On top of it we use multiple licensed VAPT tools with manual assessment method.

Each Vulnerability Assessment tools provide different scan results. Which may result in leaving open vulnerabilities.

For example, if you run two different vulnerability assessment tools for the same web application, the results can be completely different. Hence we use multiple licensed VAPT tools and manual method to filter out exact vulnerabilities within the given target.

Once all the open vulnerabilities are found. It is important task to prioritize the same. Most of the organization skip this task however this is the most crucial task to prioritize the open vulnerabilities.

In the current cyber security landscape, where threats are increasingly sophisticated and diverse, risk prioritization is an absolute necessity. Otherwise, you may end up spending a lot of time on low level risks, while the very severe ones are left unattended. In turn, this exposes your organization to serious threats that could have been easily mitigated.

Risk prioritization is an integral part of VAPT. A good VAPT strategy addresses and emphasizes this step by clearly marking which threats and which risks should be tackled first.

VAPT Reveals Security Gaps, Misconfigurations and Loopholes in Various Web Applications 

In most of the cases while developing Software/Web application, they generally do not consider the security standards. In turn leaving so many open vulnerabilities within web applications. This will attract many hackers.

Most exploitable vulnerabilities are because of misconfigurations or incorrect coding practices. VAPT testing by a third-party company is the best way to spot them and address them before they become severe issues or, worse, before an attacker is successful. You should select your VAPT provider carefully, though. 

VAPT Improves Your SDLC Process

SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) is a commonly used methodology in IT companies. As it happens with all methodologies, SDLC needs to evolve constantly to respond to new market trends and even to new cyber threats.

Regular vulnerability assessment and penetration testing as part of your VAPT process along with the SDLC process is the near-perfect way to ensure greater security. By this way your code with all the changes go through various security checks that will help to identify associated vulnerabilities well in advance.

VAPT can save the Overall IT Cost

Most of the companies do not like to invest in cyber security and thinks that this is unnecessary cost. They think till time they are safe and no longer require to invest in cyber security. But this is not true now, attackers are now targeting small business as well.

VAPT exercise will provide holistic view of your organization’s cyber security posture and helps to invest in right cyber security solution.

One Solution For Multiple Applications

There is general idea that VAPT is only suitable for websites and web applications. VAPT can also be used to find critical vulnerabilities from various IT devices like, firewall, router switches, servers and its operating systems, application level protocol like SSL, SSH, HTTPS etc.

VAPT exercise will remain same but the approach will be different based on each application type. Our experts will help to choose the right methodology and VAPT process to identify most common vulnerabilities associated with each type of devices/applications.

There Is No Standard VAPT process for all in VAPT .

At a high level VAPT process remains same. However based on each device or application type its approach and use cases to find vulnerabilities will be different.

For ex, one company has more number of web applications and other one has more number of IT devices to perform VAPT. Our experts will follow the standard VAPT practice but the tools and techniques to find vulnerabilities associated with web application will be different than the VPAT for IT infrastructure devices.

Hence, VAPT process remains same but the tools and methodology will be selected based on each use cases. In turn the scope and scope of work will vary based on the project type.

Stay Compliant

For enterprises and financial organizations, it is now mandatory to be compliant with industry security standards like GDPR, PCI DSS and various ISO standards. VAPT exercise will help them to mitigate grater security risk though, any organization conducts VAPT for the just sake of compliance purpose

Conclusion

Still, cyber security is the last thing for any IT managers to do list. Till they face any major security breach or compromise. Then they realize the importance of cyber security and VAPT.

A single attack or security breach can damage company reputation a lot. It is hard to gain trust of customer if they lose their data. Would you still wait for this time to happen?

We at CyberTalos has a wide range of cyber security solutions and we are the best VAPT service provider in India. We offer cost effective yet best in class cyber security and VAPT service.

Contact US for a free POC to know about your current security posture.

Mail us at info@cybertalos.in or call at +91 9586535511.