What is VAPT?

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) is a comprehensive cybersecurity methodology that identifies and mitigates potential vulnerabilities within an organization's IT infrastructure. The interpretation of VAPT may vary across different regions, involving a spectrum of services ranging from automated vulnerability scans to manual penetration testing and red team exercises.

Vapt is a two-pronged approach. Here’s how:

Vulnerability Assessment (VA):This utilizes automated tools to scan networks, operating systems, and applications for known security weaknesses such as outdated software versions, misconfigurations, and inadequate access controls. VA provides organizations with insight into their security posture and helps them understand where they are susceptible to attacks.

Penetration Testing (PT):Penetration testing goes beyond vulnerability assessment. It actively attempts to exploit identified vulnerabilities in a controlled manner. Skilled ethical hackers, known as penetration testers, simulate real-world cyberattacks to assess the effectiveness of an organization's security controls and incident response procedures. PT emulates the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of malicious actors and helps organizations identify critical security gaps and validate the effectiveness of their defensive measures.

A retail example to explain VAPT as a concept:

Let's say you are a medium-sized e-commerce company that sells electronic gadgets online. You store different types of customer data, including personal information and payment details. To ensure the security of your systems and protect customer data, you decide to conduct a VAPT engagement.

Initially, your team performs a vulnerability assessment using automated scanning tools. These tools scan your company's network, web applications, and servers to identify potential vulnerabilities. The scan reveals several issues such as outdated software versions on some servers, misconfigured firewalls, and unpatched systems. Additionally, the assessment identifies weak passwords used by some employees and potential security gaps in the e-commerce website's code.

With the results in hand, you proceed to conduct penetration testing. You hire a team of ethical hackers who simulate real-world cyber-attacks to exploit the identified vulnerabilities. The penetration testing team attempts various attack techniques, including SQL injection attacks against the e-commerce website, brute-force attacks on login portals, and attempts to bypass firewall rules. The team successfully gains unauthorized access to a test server by exploiting a known vulnerability in outdated software. They also manage to access sensitive customer data stored on the server, highlighting the potential impact of a successful cyber-attack on your business and customers.

What will be your remediation efforts now?

-You promptly apply security patches to update outdated software, reconfigure firewall settings to block unauthorized access and enforce stronger password policies for employee accounts.

-The development team implements additional security measures like input validation and parameterized queries.

-You conduct another round of testing to validate that the vulnerabilities have been effectively mitigated.