What is Application Penetration Testing?

Introduction

When looking around for penetration testing services, it’s important to consider what specific pen test that you need. Among the many types, if your organization has its own application, you may want to consider getting an application penetration test. Making an app is a big factor for customers, considering it makes it easier for them to do business with the organization. It’s always good to have that connection with potential customers, but the application must have good security.

An application penetration test will assist in showing the weaknesses that might be in the app. Many businesses have apps and they have become an important factor in doing business, providing ease of access to customers, convenient shopping, and even social media. Anyone can make an app about anything, but the security should be one of biggest things to consider when making one.

What is an application penetration test?

Like all penetration tests, an application penetration test, or app pen test, is a simulated attack on an application’s cybersecurity and information security. It usually involves real world methods used by bad actors and hackers to get into an application or a business through the application. However, it’s not a real attack and there’s nothing to worry about.

Using this application pen test, it will highly any vulnerabilities and high-risk threats that can cause problems for an app. There are specific regulations that need to be considered when making an application, especially if it’s part of a financial institutions. Customers must have protections in place whenever they use these applications when banking or involving money.

Steps In an Application Penetration Test

Like other penetration tests, an app pen test will have certain steps taken when it comes to infiltrating it. However, an app pen tests is somewhat different from a normal internal penetration test or external penetration test.

Planning

Penetration tests and similar information security services should always have a planning phase. It’s important for the organization to understand when and how the pen test will be performed. The cybersecurity firm will schedule a time for the test to occur, but it shouldn’t interfere with any of the application’s functions. The amount of time depends on the size of the app, but it’s usually less than three weeks of time.

Reconnaissance

The next step with most penetration tests is gathering information. Each application and business will likely have these sorts of things online, freely available to anyone who is searching for it. This means that bad actors will also have access to this information. However, they will sometimes also employ social engineering, like phishing and vishing, as well.

Scanning

With this step, the analyst will scan the application with an in-house tool to see what sort of vulnerabilities they can find and take advantage of. These vulnerabilities can range from small gasp in security updates to completely unprotected sections of the applications that users shouldn’t normally have access to.

Exploitation

Once finding these vulnerabilities, a security analyst will then move to using those vulnerabilities to get deeper into the application. This is the main point of the penetration test—attempting to get into places that they shouldn’t be able to. If an analyst manages to get into an application this way, they won’t do anything to bring down the app (unless it’s a really big vulnerability). They will simply note it and continue.

Reporting

After all is said and done, the security analyst will create a report detailing all of the things that were found. This includes any action that has been taken, missing updates, and various other vulnerabilities that might exist. These reports will usually come with remediation recommendations, considering the cybersecurity firm won’t be able to fix those themselves. Alternatively, they may have a vCISO to assist with remediations.

Conclusion

Application penetration tests are an important service to get if you have an app for your business, among other penetration tests. These apps are needed to give customers ease of access to the business, whether it’s banking, shopping, or simply chatting. If someone uses your app, there should be proper security measures taken to protect the information put into the app.

This is especially true if the application provides things like money transactions. The government has strict regulations that the app must follow in order to perform these transactions. However, businesses should keep in mind that it is important to keep all customer information safe with cybersecurity. A small slip up could cause a lot of problems and have even caused businesses to shut down, so getting an application penetration test is always a good idea.