Can you share your experience with penetration testing, and what insights have you gained from these exercises to improve overall security?

Penetration testing has been a critical component of identifying vulnerabilities in web applications and networks. My experience with Acunetix and Burp Suite has provided valuable insights into both automated and manual testing methodologies, allowing me to identify, prioritize, and mitigate security risks effectively.

With Acunetix, I leveraged its automated scanning features to quickly identify a broad range of vulnerabilities, including SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and misconfigurations in security headers. The tool’s comprehensive reports, combined with vulnerability risk scores, helped prioritize fixes based on impact. One of the primary benefits was Acunetix’s ability to integrate with CI/CD pipelines, allowing continuous security checks as part of the development cycle. This approach not only sped up vulnerability detection but also helped development teams address issues proactively.

Burp Suite Scanner, on the other hand, was particularly useful for deeper, manual testing. I often used it for tasks such as intercepting HTTP requests, analyzing traffic, and manipulating data in real-time. This tool allowed a more granular inspection of application behavior and response to different inputs, making it effective for testing authorization flaws and session management issues. One valuable insight from using Burp Suite is that many vulnerabilities, especially those related to business logic flaws and insecure direct object references (IDOR), require manual analysis. These issues are often missed by automated scans, underscoring the importance of combining automated and manual testing.

From these penetration testing exercises, I gained a few key insights to improve overall security. First, automation with tools like Acunetix is invaluable for regular scans and continuous monitoring, but manual testing remains essential for uncovering complex, logic-based vulnerabilities. Second, integrating security scans into CI/CD pipelines reduces the time from vulnerability discovery to remediation, which is crucial in agile development environments. Lastly, effective communication between development and security teams ensures that vulnerabilities are understood and addressed in a timely manner, fostering a proactive security culture that strengthens the overall application security posture.

Penetration testing is an essential process for uncovering security weaknesses in systems, networks, and applications before attackers can exploit them. Based on my experience in this field, the primary takeaway is that it's not just about finding vulnerabilities, but also about understanding how they could be exploited and remediated to strengthen overall security.

Key Insights Gained from Penetration Testing:

1. Understanding the Attack Surface: Penetration tests have allowed me to better assess and understand an organization's attack surface. By simulating real-world attacks, I can identify the most vulnerable areas that could be exposed to threats, ranging from weak passwords to misconfigurations in cloud environments like Azure Active Directory.
2. Prioritizing Vulnerabilities: Not all vulnerabilities are created equal. Penetration testing exercises have taught me the importance of prioritizing vulnerabilities based on the risk they pose to the organization. For instance, identifying high-risk issues like unpatched critical software vulnerabilities (CVE exploits) needs to be handled immediately, whereas lower-priority vulnerabilities, like informational disclosures, can be scheduled for future remediation.
3. Insights for Red and Blue Teams: Red Team exercises focus on simulating adversarial attacks, and through these tests, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of how attackers think and operate. On the flip side, Purple Team collaboration improves how both offensive (Red) and defensive (Blue) teams can work together to build more effective detection and response strategies.

Speaking more practically, we perform security audit of blockchain softwares (called smart contracts). And our experience with penetration testing (BTW it applies to all programming languages and architecture) goes follow:

1. It allows to create simulated attacks on the code base. This is to make sure code does not have any vulnerable scenarios and possibilities in which it may fail.
2. It allows to perform stress test. This is helpful to measure how much load and stress the code base can handle.
3. It also helps identify vulnerabilities in the code. This types of vulnerable scenarios in the code can harm the business reputation and also can have financial losses.
4.  It also reduced technical debt: a proactive approach to mitigate the issues before it arises and saves time, effort, and resources in the long run.
5. It also provides better understanding of the attack vectors: This helps the security team understand the ways the attacker can infiltrate the system.

These are few points were gained through conducting pen-testing in our organisation.