As a small business, you don’t do anything important enough to attract hackers' attention, right?

That’s exactly how hackers want you to think.

43% of cyber-attacks target SMBs, which is a huge chunk. Yet, only 14% of small businesses claim that they’re prepared in the event of an attack.

The thing about cyber attacks is that they’re aggressive and random. Hackers have limited information about what data you possess and might attack you anyway. All they know is that you’re a business that might have either the money or information that they want.

In this article from EliteSec, we’ll cover why penetration testing is essential for small business owners and debunk a few misconceptions about cybersecurity. Finally, we’ll provide practical tips on implementing a penetration testing strategy for your business.

What is Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing is when cybersecurity professionals emulate hackers by poking through a business’s software and potentially even hardware to identify weaknesses. Basically, this allows the business to simulate the impact of a cyber-attack before it happens in real life. It’s an ethical hacking tactic to help you protect your sensitive data.

The penetration testing process usually follows these 5 steps:

• Reconnaissance: In which the penetration tester (pen tester) gathers information about your computer systems and applications.
• Scanning: Where the tester uses an automated tool to detect vulnerabilities.
• Gaining unauthorized access: The pen tester takes all the identified vulnerabilities and leverages them to enter your system.
• Escalating Permissions: Once they’re in, the pen tester figures out how much damage they could do to your systems.
• Reporting: The pen tester attempts to make an exit undetected and then reports their findings to you.

There are also different types of testing. Like black-box testing where the pen tester has no insights into your systems ahead of time, white box testing where they have full range to ask questions, and gray-box testing where they have a mix of the two.

Now, this process is quite involved. It’s easy to see why a small business would be reluctant to carry this out, but just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean you should avoid it.

Is Your Business At Risk? Major Red Flags

Take A Look At Your Passwords

Some things that you consider normal are extremely risky from a cybersecurity perspective.

Do your employees share passwords with each other via email or sticky notes? That’s not safe at all, use a dedicated password-sharing tool if you’re going to do that.

Moreover, you could be acting in other risky ways with your passwords, for instance, you might:

• Keep the same password across multiple accounts.
• Not having enough requirements for regular password changes in your organization.
• Lack of multi-factor authentication for your accounts.

Check Your Software

You know those annoying notifications that you get telling you to update your software? Those aren’t meant to be ignored. Software updates often include vital security patches that are designed to respond to the most modern cybersecurity threats. You might not want to set aside 10 to 15 minutes to update the software, but it could cause a lot more pain for you down the road if not attended to. You’ve been warned.

Moreover, your employees' personal devices connecting to your network could pose a threat, the same thing goes for client devices or totally unknown devices. You should keep your front-facing internet separate from the secure version that your employees use.

Are Your Business Operations Resilient?

Just like updating software can feel like a pain in the neck, so can security measures. Eventually, a careless employee might end up bypassing them and causing a vulnerability.

A lack of attention is a major theme here. You might be missing documentation for certain procedures and rely on a particular employee to remember the process. And when employees leave, you might not cancel or update their credentials. It’s a major weakness.

Why You Need Pen Testing: 7 Common Traps

Trap 1: You Assume You’re Too Small To Be A Target

As we noted earlier, 43% of cyber attacks happen to small businesses. There’s no such thing as being “too small to be targeted.”

It doesn’t matter if you don’t collect customer data. It doesn’t matter if you’re not offering the most premium services for the highest prices.

All hackers see is an opportunity. Small businesses often don’t have sufficient funds to defend themselves from cyber-attacks. And if they do, their owner is more likely to spend those funds on expanding the business than they are on security.

Well, if you’re looking to scale your business you must create trust. A data breach will go a long way to harming it.

Trap 2: You Forget You Can Put Your Partners At Risk

If small businesses make for easy targets, what data are hackers targeting from such companies exactly?

Oftentimes, you work with bigger partners that have important infrastructure that they spend thousands of dollars to protect. It’s possible if you don’t protect yourself, that you could be the weak link.

For instance, let’s say an adversary easily gains access to your email. They could begin gathering data on all of your clients and spot the most juicy opportunities. This information could be just what they need to develop the right pretext for a phishing campaign against your client. Worse yet, they could just create a new email account at your company and pretend to speak on your behalf just to acquire sensitive information.

As large companies get more clever, attackers need to think of new tactics to breach their defenses. This one is significant.

Trap 3: Thinking Your Industry Isn’t Important

As we alluded to earlier, many cyber-attacks are conducted blindly. Attackers will conduct a mass attack on dozens of businesses at once with little information about their specific operations. Just because you aren’t in a high-risk sector like finance or healthcare doesn’t mean you’ll be left out.

Once again, the danger here is connected to your larger partners. You might have knowingly been identified as a vendor to a larger company and since hackers will target valuable data in any form, they’ll target you too. In fact, it’s possible that you even have information that could be sold for a hefty price on the dark web.

Trap 4: Assuming Your Firewall Will Protect You From Attacks

If you’re a Windows user, you likely have been prudent enough to install antivirus software like AVG or McAfee to your system. That’s nice, but those basic firewalls are still no match for a truly advanced attacker.

In fact, on the non-technical side of things, social engineering attacks are prevalent, with 98% of cyber attacks involving a social engineering component according to Splunk. Social engineers don’t need to breach a firewall or “hack” into any systems. All they need to do is use basic human charm and manipulation to get what they want from your business.

It goes to show that an attack is more often than not about information. Social engineers understand that the easiest way to get information is to ask. In a creative way, of course.

Trap 5: “It’s Never Happened Before, So It Will Never Happen Ever”

Following penetration testing, a study found that 62% of companies had “medium, important, or critical” security vulnerabilities. So basically, companies that were previously unaffected by problems often had problems that simply weren’t coming to the surface.

Indeed, not all cyber attacks are obvious to the victims on the day that they’re made. Remember the “escalating permissions” phase of penetration testing? That mimics a real-world behaviour in which the attacker bides their time for days, weeks, or even months lurking around your systems trying to discover where different information might be hiding. Worse yet, they could plant a backdoor to help them access your systems in the future.

It’s not until they foment a real crisis that such attackers are detected. And there are a multitude of reasons why they could be waiting to strike.

Trap 6: Expecting That One Pen Test Is Enough

Penetration tests are great, but they often provide companies with a false sense of security. Only 32% of businesses perform penetration testing annually or biannually. There is a lot of room for improvement across the board.

For one thing, penetration tests should be conducted at least once a year. Attackers are constantly discovering new tactics to break past their defenses. And pen testers are always updating their approach in response. Continuous penetration testing is the only way to combat these breaches as they evolve.

The other thing is, even if cybersecurity is a once-a-year event for your company, you must still be security-conscious in your day to day. A large part of our role as penetration testers at EliteSec is training your employees following a pen test to help them practice proper security habits.

Trap 7: Imagining What An Attack Looks Like

By now, phishing is a fairly well-understood attack technique. Most employees will know not to click a link from an email that looks suspicious.

But what if the link doesn’t look suspicious? An email sent directly with a link will usually get flagged by email providers. But a string of 5 emails? Where the sender has come up with a valid excuse to reach out to you? Even the best of us could fall for such scams. It’s unfortunate that you need to be so cautious, but you should always stay vigilant of cyber threats, however, they might appear.

5 Actionable Steps You Can Take To Protect Your Business Right Now

Protect Sensitive Data

You might not be a penetration tester, but you can certainly take inventory of sensitive data and think of strategies to protect it. Encryption can go a long way to protect it from a technical standpoint. You can also protect sensitive data with more rigid access controls. For instance, not everyone needs to have access to every document, maybe you should protect it with a password.

Improve Your Security Posture

Red teaming and other tabletop exercises will help you get a sense of where your employees currently stand with regard to cyber security awareness. Essentially, this means you can simulate various attack scenarios, particularly social engineering scenarios, to see how your team reacts in real-time. Then, you can go over what worked and what didn’t to educate your team on security best practices.

That’s the first step, but you should also update your security policies (if you have any) to reflect the modern threat landscape.

A cybersecurity professional can assist with all of these tasks!

Implement A Penetration Testing Program

Above all, penetration testing will help you uncover previously unknown vulnerabilities systematically. While vulnerability scanning can help you complete some of the jobs, it’s important that you call in an actual penetration tester to handle the rest. Unlike vulnerability scanning software, these testers will be able to brainstorm novel threats in your company’s security posture and stay abreast with the most current threats. Letting them toy with your systems like a real attacker will help you get more visibility into the main issues with your security infrastructure.

If you’re interested in implementing a pen testing program backed by years of experience, consider reaching out to us at EliteSec. Even if you have a limited budget, we can sit down for a short call to explore where your main vulnerabilities lie and provide recommendations on how to properly secure your systems.

Choose The Right Penetration Testing Vendor

Make sure that if you conduct a penetration test, you don’t try to handle it in-house More than likely, anyone who handles IT for you doesn’t have a deep understanding of how cyber threats could impact your business. For our part, our pen testers at EliteSec have all the required certifications, such as OSCP, OSWP, CISSP, CEH, and CISM. Our testing methodology involves a combination of automated and manual processes to ensure that you spend your money efficiently on the best security measures you can receive.

So, do I actually need penetration testing services?

The answer to the question “Do you need a penetration test?” Is a resounding yes!

Even if you’re just a one-person operation, there are all sorts of weaknesses to exploit. After all, the smaller the business, the less time you have to deal with attack vectors. Not to mention, there’s a good chance that your business relies on reputation, and a cyber attack that impacts your clients could really throw a wrench in that.

Follow the best practices from this article to ensure that your business, and clients, stay protected from malicious actors. And consult with us at EliteSec if you have any security questions or questions about penetration testing!