Continuous Cybersecurity Testing: A Key Strategy for Prevention

By taking a continuous approach to security testing, organizations can truly understand the resiliency of their security posture and improve their readiness to recover quickly and securely.

When it comes to cybersecurity, testing should be a fundamental starting point for businesses to harden their defenses and keep bad actors out. But the reality is contrary, only a few companies conduct security testing—and that’s if ever they do it at all, let alone on a regular basis.

Security testing helps identify vulnerabilities and risks in an infrastructure, software applications, and technology stack to ensure that your organization remains resilient against malicious attacks.

It is, in fact, one of the best security practices to examine the entire infrastructure, software, and configurations to find vulnerabilities that could be exploited by threat actors. But failing to thoroughly test and patch vulnerabilities can leave your organization vulnerable to cyberattacks, allowing attackers to access sensitive data, disrupt business operations, or even use your systems for malicious purposes.

Continuous security testing with observability enables real-time identification and faster remediation of vulnerabilities, significantly reducing the risk of exposure. Let’s explore in a bit more detail how continuous security testing helps establish a strong security posture and ensures ongoing protection against evolving threats.

Why (and How) Continuous Cybersecurity Testing Prevents Security Breaches

As businesses increasingly adopt new technologies and diversify their tech stack—leveraging a variety of external services, platforms, and tools—continuous security testing ensures that vulnerabilities are discovered before attackers do and are addressed promptly.

Organizations used to schedule fixed times for security testing, often during the final stages before release. But this method is outdated because it’s very ineffective, as periodic security tests may leave systems exposed and even exploited for too long.

This is because nothing in IT is entirely predictable, except that malicious attackers will always continue their criminal activities. However, not everyone understands that it is only by being proactive that you can protect your organization against escalating cyber threats like zero-day attacks, ransomware, and data breaches.

Here are three key insights to help you take action now and gain an upper hand on threat actors.

1./ Build a Continuous Security Testing Plan

If you haven’t already done so, create a plan for continuous cybersecurity testing to prevent attacks against your organization’s cyber capabilities. This plan should also include simulating real-attack scenarios, which can help your team members become highly prepared to adapt and respond to cyber threats.

Another helpful thing to this is that continuous testing and refining of the plan ensures that the right parties involved in the process are identified, key roles are clearly defined, and procedures are practiced in response to real incident scenarios.

2. Create a Security Testing Framework

Continuous security testing is the best practice to address rising technology threats, including ransomware and data breaches, along with insider threats, such as employees mishandling sensitive information or violating privacy regulations.

There’s no perfect cybersecurity approach, and building strong defenses can become costly. But a strong security testing process with visibility helps IT decision-makers understand the nature of cyber threats as well as the best mitigation responses. A continuous security testing framework, focused on the most critical areas, is the best way to optimize security investments.

3. Think proactively

Small improvements in cybersecurity testing can make a big difference. Evaluating processes, security tooling, and testing workflows could uncover inefficiencies that would eventually help lead to faster and a more efficient security testing program. But it all begins with security teams who take the ownership for overseeing the entire process. This includes delegating specific tasks to team members, such as examining internal processes, keeping watch on the threat landscape, identifying the biggest areas of risk, and implementing the right response plans.

Adopting a proactive stance is imperative for countering the dynamic nature of rising security threats. And through a combination of threat intelligence, a penetration testing program, and other security measures, you can strengthen your organization’s defenses, mitigate the impact of security threats, and maintain a strong security posture.

Parting Thoughts

It is an established fact that companies actually want to see how they are failing in security—most of the time. This is because cybersecurity is not about constant perfection but continuous improvement. And continuous security testing helps expose the gaps and the more gaps you discover through testing, the better prepared your organization will be in the end to withstand external attacks.

Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) platforms provide an unequivocal defense against rising security threats like ransomware, data breaches, and insider attacks. Investing in preventative measures and leveraging the threat detection capabilities of Siemba’s PTaaS platform can lead to significant improvements in your cybersecurity efficacy. Our engineers are highly equipped to conduct penetration testing exercises and simulate real-world attack scenarios to help you develop an effective response plan for increasing cyber risks.

 

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