The Key To Fraud Mitigation On Web Applications: Penetration Testing
Fraud has become one of the most important security concerns of businesses. With instances of online fraud and scams on the rise, companies—both big and small—must embrace fraud mitigation tools and strategies to shield themselves from hacking attempts and fraudsters. As found at Phonato Studios, this is where pen testing or penetration testing can be of help.
What Is Pen Testing?
Simply explained, a penetration test involves a formulated cyber attack against your systems to see whether there are any potential weaknesses that can be abused by a scammer or a hacker. When web application security comes into the picture, pen tests are conducted to examine the architecture, design, features, and configurations of web applications. Here, the primary goal is to bring out cyber security risks that may make your business susceptible to data theft or fraudulent access.
A typical pen test revolves around simulated, ethical breaching of your application protocol interfaces, as well as front-end and back-end servers to look out for gaps that could lead to code injections. With the report generated from such an endeavor, you can take steps to fortify your web applications and systems to ensure user security and ramp up your cyber defenses.
Pen Testing & Fraud Mitigation
With a pen test, you can examine user authentication pages to verify whether the creation of accounts leads to your data being exposed, go through the application to look for in-built problems, assess its security configurations, and whether data server security is being maintained. By doing so, you gain a first-hand understanding of your security controls and risks. In addition to this, you also gain inputs to enhance access controls.
As you may be aware, the use of automation in pen testing speeds up the entire process. However, a few problem areas may be left unaddressed if manual pen tests are not conducted. For instance, problems such as chain attacks, business flow bypass issues, DOM-based XSS, zero-day exploit attacks, and more may not be found with generic tools and approaches, because of their complex nature. In such a scenario, certified experts with the requisite skills and tools can be of assistance.
Conclusion
When it comes to fraud and scam prevention, the team at Phonato Studios often gets asked whether a web application penetration test is required before it becomes available to the majority. If you utilize a content management system, if there are several user accounts, and if you store payment details and other sensitive information at the back-end, then penetration testing is an absolute necessity.
With social engineering attacks and identity thefts becoming more common, the need of the hour is to embrace a variety of tools and sophisticated methods to keep scammers and fraudsters at bay. These threats can cause a lot of financial harm and even lead to loss of the intellectual property in the long run. Because of this, businesses must continuously evolve to stay one step ahead of these threat actors by embracing prevention tactics rather than waiting for mishaps to happen.