What is VAPT?
What is VAPT?
It gives us immense pleasure to restart our blog series after a long gap. Our first blog series would be called “Back to the basics”. Here we will be covering various topics in cyber security. The “Back to basics” blog series is more of a refresher for our readers and an awareness session for the newbies.
Our topic for today is: What is VAPT?
Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT), is a systematic process of determining the security weakness of a system. The system here may be a software application, a network, a cloud environment, a mobile application, IoT, etc.
VA and PT — What is the difference?
Vulnerability Assessment (VA) is the technique of identifying and measuring security weaknesses in a given environment. It is a comprehensive assessment of the information security posture of the given environment. In many cases is a precursor for penetration testing.
Penetration Testing (PT) replicates the actions of an attacker that is intended to break the information security and hack the valuable data or disrupt the normal functioning of the organization. In other words, penetration testing is an inch deep than a vulnerability assessment with a primary intent to exploit the identified weakness to see how far you can go in accessing the valuable data.
So why do you need to find the security weakness in your system?
Simply, it’s better to be prepared than to be sorry.
No target is a small target for a cyber attacker these days. In recent days attackers targeted almost any company — irrespective of their size for valuable juicy data. With ransomware in the equation, the impact on the organizations is extreme.
The main intent of the VAPT exercise is to validate the security posture of the organization and apply appropriate security controls before the attacker takes advantage of the weaknesses.
Can you do VAPT once and forget it?
With ever-evolving cyber threats, new ways of attacks and weaknesses are reported on a daily basis. A periodic security assessment is critical. The periodicity is extremely subjective — in some organizations, VAPT may be conducted annually, but in others, it may be much more frequent depending on factors such as:
1. Change in the IT environment.
2. Changes in the application
3. Whenever the is a major outbreak of vulnerability — such as Log4j vulnerability in the recent past.
4. Last but not least, based on the compliance requirement (legal, regulatory, contractual obligation). For example, the PCI-DSS standard requires the certified organization to perform external VAPT every quarter, whereas some other standards recommend VAPT to be conducted at least annually or whenever there is a significant change to the system.
How can we help you?
At Reflect Security we provide a variety of security assessment services that are tailored for your organization. Our qualified (and certified) cyber security engineers ensure complete breadth and depth coverage by various standards/guidelines including but not limited to OWASP Top 10, SANS Top 25, NIST 800–53, and PCI-DSS.
To know more about our services, please contact info@reflectsecurity.com or visit https://www.reflectsecurity.com/pentest.html. Also, subscribe to our newsletter to know more about cyber security and the latest trends.
Originally published at https://reflectsecurity.medium.com on May 5, 2022.
