No penetration testing solution is perfect. No matter how advanced a system is, it is bound to suffer from the occasional weaknesses and errors especially when there is human involvement. However, this reality is not an excuse to forego optimization and other efforts to plug loopholes.
It is important to be acquainted with the significant limitations of penetration testing to know how to spot potential issues and do something about them. Security teams cannot be expected to completely eradicate vulnerabilities, but they can drastically improve the effectiveness of their security posture by working around the limitations of their security validation processes.
Budget limitations
Virtually all organizations work within budget constraints. Security teams would certainly want to deploy and maintain all of the best security solutions, but they have to settle for what their resources can support. Organizations cannot expect eternal commitment from third-party pen-testers in particular. Everything has to be undertaken according to resource allocations. Nobody works for free, and the resources used to conduct thorough penetration testing also entail costs.
One of the most efficient solutions to make sure that pen testing is compatible with limited budgets is to use automated breach and attack simulation (BAS). It is a dependable strategy for testing security controls as they face ever-evolving cyber threats. Automated BAS tools make it possible to continuously monitor IT environments safely and cost-effectively.
While it may appear that doing regular daily tests is more exhausting, in the long run, the process is more manageable for security teams. It is also more effective in detecting problems as security analysts are not forced to work on deadlines and piled-up cyber threat updates. Additionally, since it involves automation, it does not require as many people to oversee the process or undertake manual examinations. BAS frees up resources, so they can be directed to more crucial tasks particularly when it comes to configurations, tweaks, and improvements in the security system.
“BAS tools aid in maintaining a fundamental level of security assurance more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional approaches. What’s more, when combined with the right expertise, they can also help you play a strategic role in the overall success of the business,” explains Cisco VP for Global Security Customer Experience Ashley Arbuckle in an article on Security Week.
Time constraints
Security teams typically set a specific span of time to conduct simulations and other methods to stress-test existing security controls. They need to detect threats and weaknesses in their cyber defense within a given schedule and produce a report detailing the vulnerabilities they found, methodologies used to determine the results, and an executive summary.
In contrast, cybercriminals are not bound by time. They find vulnerabilities then attack when the opportunity presents itself. Their likelihood of succeeding in breaching cyber defenses increases by the time pen testers stop their timeboxed assessments.
To address this weakness, it is advisable to adopt continuous security validation. Hackers and other cybercriminals are persistent, so why should an organization’s testing be bound by schedules? “Security and risk management leaders must confront the threat landscape based on a continuous assessment of threat and business evolutions,” writes Gartner analyst John Watts.
Additionally, it helps to employ white box assessment, a security testing method that examines the coding, design, and internal structure of a network and the software used to operate it. This facilitates the identification of internal security weaknesses and flow structure defects in the coding processes and the configuration of networks.
Scope and method limitations
Some companies perform penetration testing only for the sake of compliance, that it becomes a slapdash process fraught with compromises everywhere. However, even honest-to-goodness testing does not escape the limitations of scope and methods.
Security analysts are often forced to focus on specific targets and methods of testing. Because of budgetary and time constraints, they tend not to go beyond what can be found in the immediate system. They no longer explore interactions between interconnected systems. Likewise, they narrow down the number of methods they use according to the vulnerabilities they discover initially. Thinking outside the box is rarely practiced.
Security teams would want to use all of the custom exploits they can think of to make sure that they cover all possible attack vectors, paths, and variations. Doing this, however, is extremely time-consuming aside from being mentally exhaustive. It’s not surprising why many security teams settle with merely addressing explicitly stated targets and not deal with threats proactively.
Fortunately, the MITRE ATT&CK framework exists. This free security resource readily presents updated information on the most recent threats and attacks. It helps security teams conduct meticulous security testing as it shows details and insights on how to detect and remediate the latest malware, hacks, vulnerabilities, and other cyber problems. The threat profiles it presents allow security teams to focus on the right scope and methods whenever they conduct tests for the latest threats.
Access restrictions
It is unlikely for organizations to provide full access to all of their systems and digital resources when dealing with third-party pen testers. Some segments of the network or specific file systems and software will have to be concealed as part of an organization’s security policy. This, however, hinders effective penetration testing.
Ideally, penetration testing should be conducted by an internal security team, to avoid the need to have access restrictions. However, not everyone has the resources to hire proficient and experienced cybersecurity experts to form a full-fledged in-house security group.
Limited access prevents tests from revealing issues in configurations, the software used, and other internal factors that contribute to the weakening of an organization’s security posture. For many organizations, though, this is a sensible decision to safeguard critical network components and information.
To go around this limitation, it is recommended to undertake white box testing alongside thorough penetration testing. As pointed out earlier, white box testing allows for the exploration of the internal structure of a network as well as the coding and design of the software employed. This enables the discovery of internal threats and weaknesses that are unlikely revealed during dynamic testing processes.
A research paper published in the World Wide Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development describes white-box assessments as “highly efficient in detecting and resolving problems because bugs can often be found before they cause trouble … We can thus define this method as testing software with the knowledge of its internal structure and coding,” the paper notes.
In summary
Again, no security solution is absolute or foolproof. There will always be limitations, but these do not mean that it is acceptable to make do with weak or defective security controls. There are ways to resolve constraints and improve the effectiveness of existing cyber defenses.
