The Future of Penetration Testing: Declaring War on Modern Hacking Techniques

Cyber-attacks have increased. Implementing different security measures is a must for businesses and institutions to ensure that their systems will never become susceptible to any type of penetration. Interruptions in the performance of applications or services can lead to negative press, financial losses, lost customer trust, penalties and fines. A study published by the Ponemon Institute revealed that the average cost of information breach for the affected organization is $3.5 million.

It has become SOP for organizations to conduct penetration testing and vulnerability scans on a regular basis. Such practice is even endorsed by most IT specialists since an attack could lead to disastrous outcomes. Penetration testing assesses an IT infrastructure’s security by safely exploiting vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may exist in incorrect configurations, hazardous end-user behavior, operating systems and application flaws.

Penetration testing can also help validate the efficiency of defensive mechanism. This process is best conducted by a third party. Ethical hackers are more familiar with possible vulnerabilities than IT professionals who are in charge of running the organization’s network. Their skill and occupation may be the same, but their desired outcome is different.

Importance of Penetration Testing

Also known ethical hacking, penetration testing is conducted by organizations to prevent any attempt to mess with their systems and breach their security. Those performing penetration testing will carry out what attack perpetrators perform, but their main goal is to pinpoint vulnerabilities. The hacking is performed as an important part of the penetration and the one doing it provides periodic reports of how a certain hacking activity is affecting the server security and the website, which is then sent to the organization for proper remediation management.

There are various reasons why organizations should conduct a penetration test.

• Determine if new bugs exist in recently updated software
• Confirm if current control is efficient and properly implemented to secure senior management and IT security handlers
• Determine the weak aspects in the hardware, software and among users in order to create better controls
• Test if the applications being used are vulnerable to attacks
• Develop a strong defense against potential attacks

Security threats haunt web masters every now and then. These problems may arise due to inaccurate configuration, disabling automatic updates and a network security hole in the system. A security breach often happens if proper measures are not taken. Penetration testing should only be conducted by an expert who is known for his integrity and credibility.

How Often Should a Penetration Test Be Performed?

Penetration testing must be conducted on a regular basis to guarantee more consistent network and IT security management. This process reveals how developing vulnerabilities or recently exposed threats may be taken advantage of by attackers. Aside from regularly scheduled assessments and analysis, penetration tests should also be conducted when applying security patches, moving to new office locations, changing end user policies, adding new network applications or infrastructure and applying modifications or upgrades to the existing applications or infrastructure used by the organization.

What makes Penetration Testing Different than Vulnerability Assessment?

If you are a security professional, you are most definitely familiar with what vulnerability assessment and penetration testing are. These two are types of vulnerability testing in order to complete a vulnerability analysis. Both are valuable tools for information security and are integral components of the process of managing threat and vulnerability of network systems.

These tests have their own strengths different from each other and so they commonly combined in order to achieve a far better vulnerability analysis. In that sense, it can be deduced that these two are quite different from each other as they perform two different jobs which normally ends in different results although they are is the same focus.

Most of the time, these two are used interchangeably for some reasons which confuses consumers and thus wastes their resources because they use the wrong tool for their needs. That being that case, it is best to look into these two’s differences and clarify the distinctions between these two so that confusion can be eliminated.

Vulnerability Assessment vs. Penetration Testing

Tools for vulnerability assessment are those that are used to discover the existing vulnerabilities. What makes it different is that it does not have the ability to differentiate between flaws which when exploited can cause damage and the flaws that cannot do so. Primarily, vulnerability tool only alert companies of the flaws that already exist within their code as well as where exactly they are located. In an in-depth vulnerability assessment, it indicates the application or system’s weakness and then provide mitigation procedures as well so that those weaknesses can be eliminated or at the very least eliminated to such a level of risk that is acceptable.

On the other hand, what penetration testing does is attempting to exploit the existing vulnerabilities in the system. This is so determine if there are malicious activities or perhaps unauthorized access can happen.  Penetration tests also works on identifying any flaws of the system that can pose threat to it. What happens during penetration testing is that the action of an external or internal hacker that aims to breach the application’s information security is simulated.

The penetration tester also known as ethical hacking uses various techniques and tools in attempting to exploit and gain access to sensitive data in the system. Due to this action, the system’s information security can be improved in such a way that the simulated actions cannot possible penetrate the system’s security.

Which approach would be best for your organization?

The answer to this question lies with your existing security posture. If you are confident with security posture, then just conducting a vulnerability assessment is enough. Essentially, vulnerability assessments give you the weaknesses of the application and tell you how to fix them. Penetration testing, on the other hand, tells you whether someone can break in your security posture and exactly what that can attain if they can break in. If you want to be completely assure of your organization’s security posture, then combining these two would be your best option.

Analysing vulnerability scanning reports

Vulnerability Assessment Process

Let’s make a high level overview of the best practices of vulnerability assessment process implementation in an organisation. From Wikipedia: ”A vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing (or ranking) the vulnerabilities in a system.” How do the most organisations implement this process? The common approach is to implement the vulnerability scanning solution. There are a large number of vendors on the market who provide comprehensive vulnerability scanning solutions.

Most of the scanners can be divided in to two categories:

• Web application scanners, like Acunetix, WebInspect, NetSparker;
• Network and infrastructure scanners like Nessus, Metasploit (yes, it is not just an exploitation tool – the auxiliary modules can help you to perform the vulnerability scan as well), Qualys. These scanners can perform web application assessment as well, but their features are limited.     

The process usually is very straightforward: define the scope of the vulnerability assessment, get the permission for the audit, run the scan, analyse the results, fix the issues. However, every step brings a lot of challenges that require particular skills and knowledge from the analyst to make this process effective. This article won’t cover the end-to-end vulnerability process, but will focus more on analysing the results, discovering issues, prioritising them and make proper recommendations to remediate them. 

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Burp suite sample report

Get the right skills

First of all, let’s try to understand who should be involved in analysing results.  The correct answer is: various teams and departments should be involved in this process.

• Security professional. Since the report contains technical security issues and describes the most common hacking techniques to exploit the issues, a skilled security professional should be involved. The security analyst should have appropriate skills, knowledge and experience to understand the issues, assess a business impact and provide appropriate recommendations to fix them. Ideally the analyst should have some sort of recognised security certification and background to help them in this process. Examples of technical certifications are GWAPT, GPEN, OSCP etc. In addition they should have excellent communication skills to explain the issues to other teams.
• Network or System administrator. If the report contains results for network or operating system vulnerability scan, the results should be discussed with the IT operational department to verify them and eliminate false positives. It is necessary to consult with the IT operations team as they have knowledge of the internal systems and can provide  valuable feedback for the risk assessment process. However, it should be considered that administrators tend to lower those risks as they will be responsible for fixing the issues and most of the time they don’t want the auditors to discover any high risk items. Separation of duties should be enforced.
• Web developers. This team will be quite useful during web application analysis. Have a chat with them before starting the scan to understand an application’s functionality and technologies to make sure you don’t miss any critical requirements during the vulnerability scan. Sometimes companies use external vendors to create web apps, so make sure you receive all the relevant documentation and APIs (for web services) beforehand. After getting results, send them to the vendor for a validation and feedback. 
• Senior management. It is absolutely critical to have senior management support and deliver the results to them, as they will be responsible for allocating a budget to fix the issues. Senior managers usually don’t have technical background, which is why vulnerabilities should be explained in non-technical terms and as simple as possible. The vulnerability scanners can produce an executive summary section with nice graphics, numbers and tables, but it is usually more effective just to have a 5 minute face-to-face chat and explain them what the risks are. Use such terms as “compliance”, “risks”, “brand damage”, “privacy concerns”, “penalties” etc.
• Legal and regulatory. If a scope includes any systems which hold customer or employees personal data, have your legal or regulatory department review the issues. The privacy laws are very strict in countries like UK, Australia, US, EU etc. and any breach of personal data can cause severe penalties for an organisation. In addition, if the scope includes systems that process credit card information, that organisation should be PCI DSS compliant.  

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Netsparker sample report

First look at the report

You have just received a report from the vulnerability scanning solution. What are the first things you need to look at?

• Scope. Make sure all the necessary URLs and IP addresses were covered in the report. A few things can go wrong. For example, when performing a web application scan the crawler doesn’t always discover all of the content on the web site. Admin pages, subdirectories, subsites might not be discovered because there is no direct link from the main site. If this happens make sure you manually add required URLs and rescan again. For network assessment, double check IP addresses. Sometime firewalls block whole subnets so that scanners can’t communicate with targeted computers. Host based firewalls can also block traffic.
• Scanning errors. When analysing the report, you might see that ports were open during the initial scan, but after a few minutes they’ve been closed. This might indicate that a IPS or WAF firewall is in place and blocks the analyst’s IP address. Vulnerability scanners usually produce an error saying they can’t connect to the target anymore and require input from an analyst.
• Plugins / signature version. It is always recommended to use the latest plugins during the scanning. If plugins are more than one or two weeks old, critical vulnerabilities might be missed. New vulnerabilities are discovered every day and vendors do a great job to update the signatures within reasonable timeframes.
• Date and time. If analysing  a report performed by a third party company or even by developers/network admin/test team,  the date  of the report is critical When scanning preproduction environments, the version should be close to the final production version to make sure there were no modifications to the code or environment after the scan. If the report is old, you might want to retest findings or cover new functionality that was developed after the scan. 

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Acunetix sample report

Common high risk issues

Suppose you are analysing the network or infrastructure vulnerability scanning report. What issues should be looked at with high priority?

• Missing security patches. It is very common to see that servers, workstations, database servers, web servers are missing critical security patches. Even today when most companies have established patch management process, it is not unusual to see, for example, legacy / dev / test Windows servers with missing MS08-067 security patch. Why this patch is important? This patch fixes the vulnerability which is widely exploitable by Conficker worm, which caused a lot of problems back in 2008. The Metasploit framework has a working exploit for this vulnerability as well, which allows a remote attacker to gain full control over the server. Make sure you subscribe to Microsoft patch alerts and also for the security RSS feed to be aware which vulnerabilities have exploits in the wild.

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Top 10 products with the most reported vulnerabilities. Report by Qualys.png

• Default or easy passwords. These are probably the most dangerous and the most common security issues. How many of your Cisco routers have a default password “cisco”? How many Microsoft SQL servers have empty password for the SA account? If you find these issues on your network, you probably have some serious gaps in your security processes. The examples above are probably easy to fix or discover. It is more difficult to fix - for example, Tomcat or Jboss servers with default accounts. During the installation process, Tomcat doesn’t offer the administrators to change the default password and installs itself with username “tomcat” and password “tomcat”. Knowing these credentials, it is possible for a potential hacker to change the configuration of the web server or even deploy new applications, which usually provides full access to a server.
• Insecure services or protocols. FTP, Telnet, HTTP protocols are still widely used. All these protocols transmit credentials in cleat text. Hackers can sniff a network, intercept traffic or perform Man-in-the-Middle attacks and gain unauthorised access to information. Telnet usually provides command line access to the target device, so integrity or availability of information can be affected. Anonymous FTP servers can provide “write” access to the server, so hackers can store prohibited materials on them, such as cracked software, pirated movies etc.

Web application vulnerability scanning reports usually contain following issues:

• SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities happen because developers don’t validate input or output parameters properly. SQL injection vulnerability allows external attackers to put malicious SQL commands into URL parameters and manipulate backend databases: create, modify, delete the tables, grab users’ passwords, and upload malware on the server. XSS (Cross site scripting) issues allow hackers to attack customers, which affects the company’s reputation and damages the brand. These issues should be fixed as soon as possible.
• Encryption issues. SSL v2 currently is considered insecure and was supervised by SSL v3 back in 1996. However, a large number of web sites still support it. Recommendation? Disable it! All browsers releases after 1997 support SSL v3 so there shouldn’t be compatibility issues. If a user connects to a web sites (eCommerce, banking application etc.) usingSSL v2, hackers sniffing the traffic have a very good chance to decrypt it and get access to credentials. In addition, if you are running online shop and process credit card details, having SSL v2 enabled on your web site means failing PCI DSS compliance. 
• Click jacking and Cross-frame scripting. This is very debatable topic and there are a lot of articles and talks about this at the time of writing this article. Should we rank this vulnerability as high critical or informational? Burp Suite reports XSF issues as informational (not even low), Acunetix and Netsparker don’t even report on them. HP WebInspect will raise this as a high risk issue which should be fixed as soon as possible. Let’s understand the impact of this issue: XSF allows potential hackers to put a web site inside a frame and force users to perform transactions they probably don’t want. For example, a user might see a web site saying “Click here to win an iPad”, but in reality when a user clicks the button, they will make a bank transfer to the hacker’s account. So if you run a highly sensitive application, you should definitely fix this issue. In case you are running a marketing web site without any user interaction, you might ignore them. 

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Burp suite reporting potential Clickjacking attack

False positives

All reports (remember, ALL reports) contain false positives. Even if a vendor of the vulnerability scanner tells that their product doesn’t produce false positives, it is not exactly correct. Indeed vulnerability may be on the web site, but the severity should be always questioned. All the web sites are different depending on the business requirement and no security product has a signature database that fits them all. Some common false positives are listed below:

• Outdated software. Most vulnerability scanners determine a software version based on a banner it presents. For example, when you connect to the Apache web server, headers or error messages usually tell you which version of software is used. Can you trust this information? No. Administrators can easily change a version number to trick the potential attackers. They can increase the version number to make an impression that they are running the latest version of the software. Or they may even want to decrease the version to create a honeypot, so that hackers spend their time attacking less valuable asset. Sometimes updates don’t increase the version number: for example, if you are running Apache on Red Hat, security patches won’t affect the version.
• Brute force attacks. It is very usual to see the vulnerability scanners reporting that a web application is vulnerable to brute force attack. How do they check it? They try the same credentials several times, usually five or ten times, and analyse the reaction to this activity. They expect that the web application will present an error after ten times saying that the account is locked and a user should contact the support department or use the password forget link. But what if the web application doesn’t display an error but still blocks an account? This case is very difficult to handle and should be verified manually by the security analyst. The verification is very straight forward: just try to login to the account after ten unsuccessful login attempts. If you can login in, then you have an issue. If not, mark the issue as a false positive.
• Changed admin credentials or paths. One of the best practices is to assign the “administrator” account to Guest usergroup and rename the real admin account to something not obvious, for example “John”. This may trick the hackers to spend valuable time to try to brute force the password for low privileged account. Unfortunately, this may trick the vulnerability scanners as well. So make sure you understand the environment and double check all the issues before you escalate the issues to the senior management.

False negatives

How can you find false negatives in the report? The simple answer: you can’t. False negatives are the vulnerabilities which were not discovered by the scanner, but present on the real site. The security analyst should be aware when false negatives can happen and make sure they are discovered by manual testing.

• Out-of-Band Authentication. In order to improve the security, many companies implement two factor authentication or user registrations with out-of-band communications. This includes sending SMS to a customer mobile phone, calling a customer, sending emails or using a Mobile application to login. The tester should manually review the login process and see if there are potential security issues. Is the new password sent to the user in clear text? Is the SMS code predictable, for example incremental? Is it possible to hijack a customer account if a hacker has physical access to the phone? Create use or business cases and try to understand the end-to-end data flow to perform a comprehensive risks assessment.
• Business login flaws. For a complex application, which gathers data from different sources and have multiple user profiles and products, each business transaction should be analysed for potential issues. The vulnerability scanners can tell if input fields don’t filter the malicious code, but they can’t tell you whether your business process is well designed or not. Do you remember the recent vulnerability in Skype? Hackers could hijack users account by simply contacting the support department! The user validation was based on telling five contact details from the list, email that was used during the registration and a full name. All these details can be easily obtained or discovered, so a large number of accounts were compromised. Definitely a business process flaw.
• Restricted pages and lack of privileges. A typical marketing web site has in average two or three privilege levels (user level and admin), but a banking application may have more than a hundred different roles and hundreds of different privileges. In order to perform the comprehensive vulnerability assessment, you need to create N*M size matrix, where N is a number of privileges, M is a number of functions and test all input parameters using different credentials. Vulnerability scanners can do a good job for small applications; however, complex web portals require a lot of manual configuration from the security analyst.

Follow up on the findings

So now you have vulnerability reports produced by a scanner and you have eliminated all false positives and negatives. What is the next step?

• Categorise findings. Depending on your company’s risk appetite and risk management matrix, you need to assign the appropriate risk level to the issues. I recommend you work closely with the risks management department (if you have one) or someone from the senior management to understand the real impact on your organisation. Popular risk matrixes are 5x5 and 3x3, but you can find organisations using 3x5, 5x7, 5x3 and others. The simpler the matrix the better, however, it needs to have enough flexibility to categorise the risks.
• Send the technical finding to the IT team. Work closely with the network admins, web developers and system administrators to resolve the issues. Share the recommendations provided by the vulnerability scanner (make sure you understand them first) and be prepared to clarify them or answer additional questions. The technical teams will try to avoid making any changes on the production systems as it might break the existing functionality. If the changes are necessary or affect a large number and system downtime is required, make sure you implement them on the test or developer system first, validate that the issue is fixed and then implement the changes in production environment.
• Retest the issues after they are fixed. When you get the confirmation from the IT team that the issues are fixed and the risks are remediated, retest is required to validate this. You might want to rescan the whole system or the application if the time allows, or just manually validate the findings from the initial report. Some issues are pretty straightforward to retest, for example if the web site is using SSL certificate or not, Telnet port is opened or closed etc. However, such issues as XSS vulnerabilities, insufficient access controls for the network folders, password policies require some time to validate.  

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Simple risk matrix

Keeping the records

If your company performs the security assessment of one web site once per year, you probably can just keep the report in the email or on a network folder. But what if you have hundreds of web sites and critical systems and you perform the assessment every three month?

• Excel spread sheets. All vulnerability scanners allow exporting the results to CSV or XML files. Excel is a very powerful tool to sort, analyse and monitor the results. You can import the results from multiple scans, track the statistics and build trends. Put the information about the remediation activities and follow ups. Pivot Tables will help to generate the reports across multiple security scans and build nice graphs, which can be used in management presentations. Of course, Excel has its drawbacks. Managing and consolidating results for more than a hundred systems will be a nightmare. The average scan contains about fifty to eighty finding per system, so for a hundred web sites the report can contain 50000 rows. If you perform the scan more than twice per year, it will become unmanageable.
• Vulnerability management software. You need to clearly understand the difference between two products: vulnerability scanner and vulnerability management software. Some vendors, as Nexpose, include the vulnerability management software in the package with vulnerability scanner; some sell them separately, for example Nessus. A vulnerability scanner actively communicates with the target system, sends the malicious packets and analyses the results, which can then be exported to PDF, HTML, CSV and other formats. Vulnerability management software gets the results and provides a comprehensive dashboard to present the results. It can build trends, sort the results by criticality, and keep additional records, for example business purpose of the system or location. The reporting component allows generating the compliance reports against widely used standard, for example PCI DSS, ISO 27001, or again the corporate policies, for example the percentage of computers with outdated software or weak password policy.
• 3rd party bug tracking software. If you perform the web application assessment, the web developers might want the results to be imported into bug tracking software. Popular systems are Jira, Bugzilla and Zoho Bugtracker. This approach provides faster fixing times because the developers are familiar with the software and use it on a day-to-day basis. Some vulnerability scanners, for example HP Fortify, provide the integration out of the box so the export process is very simple. The drawback of this approach is limited reporting. The bug tracking tools have their own prebuild reports, which may not be suitable for security issues and are not aware of industry standards. You can always create your own report, but it will take time and effort. 

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Nessus sample report

Summary

The network and web application vulnerability management process is very important to keep the organisation secure and minimise the risk of compromise. Vulnerability scanners will help to proactively identify issues before the external hackers can discover them. To achieve the best results reports should be analysed and appropriate actions should be undertaken to mitigate the risks.

• The security analyst should have experience and knowledge of common hacking attacks and mitigation strategies;
• Obtain the feedback from the IT team and senior management when categorising issues and assessing the security risk;
• Try to reduce the number of false positives to make sure you focus on important issues;
• Review the scope manually to ensure the vulnerability scanners have covered all the functions, inputs and services;
• Keep records to show to external auditors, senior management or other team members.

Remember, the main purpose of the vulnerability management process is to reduce the risk to acceptable level. Tools like vulnerability scanners can provide the data and perform some routine tasks, but team input is absolutely required to achieve the best results.

On the Web

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulnerability_assessment - The overview of the vulnerability assessment process

http://www.imperva.com/resources/glossary/clickjacking_ui-redressing.html - Clickjacking explained

http://hothardware.com/News/Skype-Account-Hjiack-Vulnerability-Via-Skype-Support-Discovered/ - Skype Account Hijack Vulnerability

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/software.html?compURI=1337262#.Uor4wNLilwY – HP Web Inspect vulnerability scanner

https://community.qualys.fr/servlet/JiveServlet/previewBody/1541-102-1-1535/Sourcefire%2025%20Years%20of%20Vulnerabilities%20Research%20Report-%20A4%20(1)%20-%20copie.pdf – Qualys report on most common vulnerabilities.

http://www.acunetix.com/security-audit/siteauditreport.pdf - Acunetix report sample

http://portswigger.net/burp/samplereport/BurpScannerSampleReport.html - burp suite sample report

http://www.tenable.com/products/nessus/sample-reports - Nessus sample reports

Glossary

Vulnerability assessment - A process for identifying inadequate computer and network securities that cause technological weaknesses. Assessments also generally include methods for prioritizing and implementing additional security measures for fixing and protecting systems.
Application programming interface (API) - In most procedural languages, an API specifies a set of functions or routines that accomplish a specific task or are allowed to interact with a specific software component.
Intrusion prevention systems (IPS), also known as intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS), are network security appliances that monitor network and/or system activities for malicious activity. 
A web application firewall (WAF) is an appliance, server plugin, or filter that applies a set of rules to an HTTP conversation.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a proprietary information security standard for organizations that handle cardholder information for the major debit, credit, prepaid, e-purse, ATM, and POS cards.
SA account - The sa account is created during the installation process of the MS SQL server and the sa account has full rights in the SQL Server environment. By default, the sa password is blank (NULL), unless you change the password when you run the MSDE Setup program.
Out-of-Band Authentication is the use of two separate networks working simultaneously to authenticate a user.
Use case- In software and systems engineering, a use case is a list of steps, typically defining interactions between a role (known in Unified Modeling Language (UML) as an "actor") and a system, to achieve a goal. The actor can be a human or an external system.

What You Need to Know About Web Application Security

Web applications being used at enterprises that hold valuable and sensitive data and information related to the business’ consumers are normally at a higher risk from hackers and malicious viruses. So as to guard this sensitive data, businesses must integrate cost effective web application security measures. In a nutshell, companies should consider acquire services of a reliable managed web applications security provider that provides extensive security.

When viruses or hackers attack web applications, they can end up causing devastating disruptions that are not only costly but also severely affect the operations of the business. When web applications security test measures are taken regularly and properly, enterprises can end up getting affected severely. As a result, not only do these companies fail to earn the trust of their consumers but they also end up experiencing irreversible loss.

The most ordinary and widespread state for an enterprise is vulnerability. It frequently needs patches to appropriately administer web application security so as to save the standard operations from being disturbed; enterprises need to utilize efficient patch management. It definitely is a difficult operation and necessitates the services of an expert IT team that can easily manage the operation of patches that are vital. Apart from of the patching process’ competence, defense from probable attacks cannot be pledged.

There are several techniques that hackers use for instance, SQL injection, buffer overflow, cross site scripting, and denial of service. These vulnerabilities are employed more than the configuration problems during the attacks. The reason for this is that, it is generally easier for hackers to make use of vulnerabilities since the process of patching is not efficient. Nevertheless, a very effective way of countering this problem is by acquiring managed web application security services.

Web security tests basically find out if or not the security processes in an enterprise are in conformity with the regulations and are competent enough to act in response to the attacks. The online system on the other hand ensures that all the vulnerabilities are positioned with respect to the point of view of the hacker so that the problems and issues are resolved accordingly in an efficient manner.

At Lean Security, our experienced security consultants carry out high-level security assessment of our clients’ web applications, highlighting all the security issues and providing our customers with pertinent guidance and support to ensure that their data is secure.

Protecting Your Virtual Businesses: Better to Be Safe Than Sorry!

In today’s world, each and every enterprise is choosing to adapt the latest technology and use highly technical devices that are incorporated with the Internet. As it speeds up the operations within a company, it also makes security very crucial.

When a business starts using web applications and cloud, besides being fast and efficient, it also becomes vulnerable to various kinds of threats including virus attacks, mischievous hackers, immoral use of the web by external or internal invaders, bandwidth theft etc.

If no steps are taken to ensure the security of these applications and cloud storage then a company can end up losing thousands to millions of dollars if the system gets infected or the invaded. Hence, relevant steps must be taken in order to keep the company’s valuable data and information safe from such breaches.

This is exactly where Managed Security Services Providers come in handy. Companies that choose to acquire the services of a managed security services provider never get victimized by security threats and issues since a company is continuously keeping an eye on their operations.

These services are reasonably priced and a reliable managed security services provider offers quality services to its clients. There can be diverse standards on which the enterprise’s security mechanism must be outsourced. With managed security services, customary and habitual scanning of the web and internet applications is vital and so is the detection of incoming or potential threats and loopholes in the security system.

The security services providers scan the entire system on a regular basis to make sure that the data and operations on the system are safe and secure. They also backup all the important data and information so that it can be used in case of an accident. Managed security services eliminate all the loopholes that are to be normally found in the cloud and web applications and provide ease, convenience and a whole lot of other positives, through their unique cloud computing security architectures.

Businesses can now transition very easily to cloud computing with the added guarantee that Managed Security Services Providers will be there to protect their integrity against all security challenges that might come their way.

At Lean Security, our experienced security consultants carry out high level security assessment of our clients’ web applications and highlight all the security issues and provide our customers with pertinent guidance and support to ensure that their data is secure.