What is the Benefits of Penetration Testing

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A penetration test, or pen test, is an attempt to evaluate the security of an IT infrastructure by safely trying to exploit vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may exist in operating systems, service and application flaws, improper configurations, or risky end-user behavior.

What is the Benefits of Penetration Testing

Proactive identification of the criticality of the vulnerabilities and false positives given by the automated scanners. This helps in prioritizing the remedy action, whether the vulnerability is to be patched immediately or not based on the criticality.
Penetration testing helps complying the audit regulatory standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA and GLBA. This avoids the huge fines for non-compliance.
A security breach may cost heavily to an organization. There may be a network downtime leading to a heavy business loss. Penetration testing helps in avoiding these financial falls by identifying and addressing the risks.

The below benefits are happened after you do what is mentioned

Benefits Depending on the needs, there are two types of penetration testing.

External Penetration Test – This test shows what a hacker can see into the network and exploits the vulnerabilities seen over the internet. Here the threat is from an external network from internet. This test is performed over the internet, bypassing the firewall.
Internal Penetration Test – This test shows risks from within the network. For example, what threat an internal disgruntled employee can pose to the network. This test is performed by connecting to the internal LAN.

Benefits Depending on the knowledge, there are three types of penetration testing, Black box, White box and Gray box.

Black Box – This test is carried out with zero knowledge about the network. The tester is required to acquire knowledge using penetration testing tools or social engineering techniques. The publicly available information over internet may be used by the penetration tester.
White Box – This test is called complete knowledge testing. Testers are given full information about the target network. The information can be the host IP addresses, Domains owned by the company, Applications and their versions, Network diagrams, security defenses like IPS or IDS in the network.
Gray Box – The tester simulates an inside employee. The tester is given an account on the internal network and standard access to the network. This test assesses internal threats from employees within the company.