Monday, May 13, 2013

In-house Penetration Testing vs Outsourced Penetration Testing



For the management of a company with online presence, web security is a big concern now a days. Pen-testing is a way of finding security loopholes in the website. From the management point of view, the biggest doubt about pen-testing is -


Shall we develop our in-house pen-testing team or shall we outsource the testing? Is it worth developing in-house pen-testing team?


We, HACKViDHI, strongly recommend you to outsource the pen-testing work instead of developing your own pen-testing team, following are couple of worth mentioning points explaining why you should choose outsourcing -



In-house Penetration Testing
Outsourced Penetration Testing
Frequency of full penetration testing cycle
Penetration testing is often not needed as frequently as functional testing. A simple bug fix might need a complete round of functional testing while the same big fix might not need a complete penetration testing cycle.
So having an in-house penetration testing team might be overkill as the penetration testing team will only be needed from time to time.

When it comes to outsourcing penetration testing, you will outsource it only when you will need it. This will lead to reduced cost estimates.
Penetration testing toolkit
Penetration testing involves using some automated tools along with manual efforts. In-house team needs to buy or develop all such tools or softwares in order to proceed. This means investing significant amount of time\cost in order to prepare penetration testing toolkit.
On the other hand if you are outsourcing it, the vendor company should already have the required toolkit. Since they will be reusing this kit for all their clients, they will charge you less than what you would have invested it to prepare the same kit.
This fact, again, will lead to reduced cost estimates for pen-testing.
Experience does matter
In-house penetration testing team will know only about the issues that have been found in previous releases of the website, they will not be having any idea about what other prevalent issues are going on in other websites as the team has limited exposure.
This can lead to ignoring some important vulnerability while giving extra attention to the vulnerabilities found in last release.
The vendor pen-testing company has exposure to lots of type of security issues as they have experience of testing different type of websites. So they have idea about the hot issues with latest tools and technologies.

This will lead to quality results with proper emphasis to proper type of issues.
Learning new attack dimensions - training cost
Penetration testing is a continuously emerging field as new threat vectors are being discovered each and every day. In-house penetration testing team needs to be aware of all advancements in the field of web-security; this means the team will need continuous trainings and learning resources. These trainings will require signification amount of investment.

Investing in trainings will be costly for the vendor company as well but they will be using the knowledge gained from those training for the benefit of multiple clients. So while giving cost estimation for pen-testing they will be splitting the training charges.
For you, this is again a cost saving fact.
 

If you are from an e-commerce domain, or are associated with online business in any manner, it is imperative to you to make sure that your business and your customers information is in safe hands. With HACKViDHi penetration testing services, you can find out the vulnerabilities of your online business and, using our consultation, can work towards fixing them up so that you can save your business and customers information from exposing.

To know more, contact us by e-mailing us to contactus@hackvidhi.com or visit our website for a free trial  at http://www.hackvidhi.com and we will get back to you. 



-Archana


Top Web Security Threats

Here is our presentation on top security threats in the field of web application development -

This presentation also talks about the impact on the website if any of those threats are exploited. The presentation does not cover technical details of the threats, it focuses more on business impact.


-Archana


Friday, April 19, 2013

e-ShopLifting: An Introduction


Dictionary defines shoplifting as “To steal merchandise from a store that is open for business”. E-shoplifting is the act of stealing articles/modifying pricing or similar fraud done by a malicious user (an e-shoplifter) from an online shopping store.

With advancement of technology and e-commerce, the online business has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, with same pace or has advanced the malware and attacks on the internet. E-Shoplifting is  majorly used to buy a product in a price lesser than mentioned in the website. It also refers to stealing the customer details such as his/her credit card number, which could further lead to much more than stealing from a particular shopping transaction.
The e-shopping works around four entities:
1. The online store - which lists the items for sale.
2.The customer - who intends to buy the items, adds them to his 
shopping cart and finally enters details to make the payment.
3. Payment Gateway - It receives from the online store, the payment details provided by the customer,  communicate to his bank, enables the money transaction and once transaction is done, sends an acknowledgement to the online store.
4. Bank - Bank verifies the information sent by the payment Gateway and completes the transaction.
In case of e-shoplifting, there comes one more entity:
5. The E-shoplifter aka hacker, who tampers the customer’s details before it reaches to the payment gateway.


Among various measures used by the online stores, most famous are,  sending checksum with other details to make sure the data is not tampered and verifying the amount debited in the acknowledgement from payment gateway. These measures are not enough and provide only limited security. The checksum used here can be calculated by the hacker and even if the store uses a private key, seeing the modern computer’s processing power, it is possible for the hacker to guess the key too. Furthermore, the verification of the bank acknowledgement also does not guarantee security, as the e-shoplifter who tampered all details being sent to bank can also change the amount in the acknowledgement to match it with his tampered version.


E-shoplifting may not be 100% avoided even with complex security measures but can be reduced to a great extent only by implementing and adopting few security best practices in the online store website and in e-shopping workflow.  


If you are from an e-commerce domain, or are associated with online business in any manner, it is imperative to you to make sure that your business and your customers information is in safe hands. With HACKViDHi penetration testing services, you can find out the vulnerabilities of your online business and using our consultation, can work towards fixing them up so that you can save your business and customers information from e-shoplifting. To know more, contact us by e-mailing us to contactus@hackvidhi.com or register to our website for a free trial at http://www.hackvidhi.com and we will get back to you.


Check our presentation on E-Shoplifting @ http://www.slideshare.net/hackvidhi/e-shoplifting-hackvidhi.