The Basics Of Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing

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Do you want your business to have a secure system? Protect it from dubious characters who want to steal sensitive documents by hiring a reputable information security specialist. They can provide ethical hacking, penetration testing, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) training and consulting. Here is more information about what this is and what it can do for your company.

What is an information security specialist?

Another term for an information security specialist is a computer security specialist. This expert is responsible for protecting the computer system from threats. These threats can be internal or external in nature. Other than, private businesses, the specialist provides services for government agencies and educational institutions.

The need for these skilled professionals continues to grow. This is because threats to computer systems and networks develop rapidly along with technological developments. Due to this, the specialist must continue to upgrade his or her level of knowledge. He or she must also increase arsenal of useful tools, applications, and systems.

A basic security measure involves the control of passwords. A computer security specialist may require the members of the company to change their password frequently. This reduces the chances of unauthorized access to confidential programs, networks, or databases.

Who would I protect my business from?

Usually, the most dangerous risk to any computer network comes from outside sources. The specialist puts up firewalls for hackers. He or she regularly installs programs that have automatic alerts when there is any attempt to infiltrate the system. You can even find high-tech programs that can point out where the hacker is by identifying the internet protocol address of the intruder.

Two popular services offered by computer specialists are ethical hacking and penetration testing.

Ethical hacking and Penetration testing 101

Skilled computer experts usually perform ethical hacking. They use their programming skills to know the weaknesses in computer systems. While you can find non-ethical hackers abusing the vulnerabilities for personal gain, the ethical hacker evaluates and points them out, then suggests changes to strengthen the system. Computer experts keep systems and information safe with their ethical hacking services.

Most IT specialists consider ethical hacking as plain hacking because it still makes use of knowledge of computer systems in an attempt to crash or penetrate them. Most business owners consider it ethical because of its purpose, which is to increase the security in systems.

Penetration testing, on the other hand, is a kind of security evaluation done on a computer system. This involves a person trying to hack into the system. The goal of this service is to find out if someone with malicious intent can enter the system. Penetration testing can reveal what programs or applications hackers can access once they penetrate the system. There are many firms and online businesses offering penetration testing. This is highly-recommended, as damage to a computer system caused by a hostile attack can be costly to repair.

Most companies are required to have penetration testing. Compliance with the standard can seem difficult at first, but you can find many companies that have enough experience to help businesses meet the requirements at all levels.

Ami Watson is in It student who knows about ethical hacking and penetration testing.

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Improve Your Site with Usability Testing Software

Chances are the goal of your online site is to make sales. You want visitors to convert into customers so that your sales increase and so does your income. This can only happen if your visitors can navigate your site with ease. The simple fact is that sometimes sites can give visitors problems and their initial reaction is to just leave. If that is the case, how would you ever know that there is a problem that needs to be fixed? If you employee usability testing software then you have the ability to see their visit and understand what might have stopped them from taking the next step.

The right usability testing tool will give you the chance to walk through the visit the same way that your visitor did. It will record website visitors and save their experience for you to watch directly. The programs often have mouse tracking so that you can see step by step how they navigated your site and if there was a problem that prevented them from making that order. This allows you to fix any problems so that the next visitor will not encounter it.

Having a websites visitor tracker is important if you want to keep your site running in top shape and see the most conversions from it. Unfortunately most analytic software just does not offer the capabilities that you need. Instead you need to find a usability testing tool that offers the features you need to reenact the visitors steps one by one. This can give you the chance to fix any errors and potentially turn future visitors into paying customers
When you want a websites visitors tracker it is easy to fall for the wrong one. Most common analytics software will tell you how many visitors you had and potentially even show you where they came from. What they do not do is show you how they navigated your site and what stopped them and led them to leave. If you are looking to turn visitors into conversions, this information is something that you need. That means you must find the right usability testing tool.

Usability testing software comes with a variety of features and capabilities. What you want is the ability to see the steps of each visitor one by one. This mouse tracking will allow you to walk through the site the same way that your visitor did. Since you will see what they saw as well as what stopped them, it could allow you to fix any website problems before it harms future sales. These are features that standard analytics do not provide.

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Is Testing Banking Application a Nightmare ?EUR" Know Why?

Information technology has completely changed the way banks use to operate until last decade. The criticality of banking IT systems lies in their sheer size, vast number of transactions they facilitate every minute, and wide range of their portfolio offerings. With their expansion plan mounting day by day, need to integrate the IT systems in various branches with main IT stream is becoming more challenging and complex.

Testing & re-testing becomes inescapable in case of banking applications as even a minute error can result in loss of repeat business, revenues and permanent damage to organization's reputation. Further, a small mistake can put the banking & financial institution through severe legal scrutiny.

The characteristics that make any banking application a nightmare for testers are as follows:

1) Recurrently changing regulatory & market requirements: Increasing competition in the market via various banking products and services heaves new functional requirements for banking applications in an ongoing manner. In addition, the regulatory firms keep adding new standards which are mandatory from legal and requirement perspective, and have to be fulfilled by every banking application. As a result of this, the business application has to go through frequent releases and upgrades throughout the year and needs to be tested multiple times. Whether a bank is using customized software or a standard product, the frequently changing regulatory and market requirements affects both.

Test execution for every single release generally includes major portion for regression testing. It is something which is not very exciting among the testers including business users. Running these tests multiple times also increases the cost of the application.

2) Maintaining data confidentiality & test data requirements: Testers are more likely to use the data copied from production systems as a test data. However, recent bank secrecy laws and standards in various countries does not allow anyone to use the test data as it is from live servers so as to protect the confidentiality of the data. Banking industry, being a service provider to almost every organization in some or the other way, needs to build trust more than any other industry in order to gain its customer confidence.

Employing internal or external IT developers and testers use the production data for testing purposes increase the probability of legal breaches & reputational damages. The data confidentiality requirements mount with the stringency of the country specific laws and with the international distribution of business and IT.

3) Complex legacy & application systems: Banking applications are often too complex to understand. The know-how about each and every system involved in it functionality is scattered within and outside the organization. The dependency and integrity of one application with other further leads to complications which imply the risk of being overseen when new releases are developed. It only gets worse when legacy systems are involved having a lower level of documentation and cluttered data design. In addition, such applications root interfaces to external apps for market data and for settlement of transactions in the trading and payment area.

As an outcome, the data that is being used in app under test actually originates from another app that is far up the stream. This makes it difficult for testers to produce test data which suites and fulfills all the cross application data constraints.

Offering a risk-free transaction is the ultimate motto of every bank. But in order to achieve this objective, the applications should be put under scrutiny which demands a focused and strategic approach from testers. We will soon discuss the approaches to overcome the above mentioned challenges in the next article.

AppLabs, a CSC company is the world's largest Software Testing Quality Management Company. Our quality management and testing services utilize its many years of banking and finance experience across the globe to support clients who view technology as a business enabler and help them deliver enhanced business value with optimized benefits. Our testing solutions for Banking and Payment Processing applications centers on helping our customers focus on most important paradigms in modern day banking - customer acquisition and retention, risk management and regulatory governance / compliance and payments.

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Pairwise Testing (All-Pairs Testing): The Tool for Reducing Software Testing's Manpower

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In the software testing world, every tester tries to optimize the validation's manpower. The normal practice is using Black Box Testing to optimize their test cases which will be used as guideline when you validate your software.

Black Box Testing

Black Box Testing is a method which testers use for test case design to reduce the testing manpower when they have no idea about software's internal algorithm. Testers only know the input and its expected output from the software which is based on specification.

The advantage of Black Box Testing is:
- Test Cases can be designed as soon as specifications are ready.
- Programming skill is not required. Business user can involve easily.
- Help to identify ambiguity and contradiction in specifications.

Pairwise Testing (All-pairs testing)

In this article, I will introduce you to the Pairwise Testing (All-pairs testing) which can help you design the validation for a feature that related to many inputs. The key idea of this technique is "The most bugs in software are introduced by a single input parameter. The next one is introduced by interaction between pairs of input parameters." So, Pairwise Testing (All-pairs testing) is initiated for finding these bugs which is used to design test cases for validating all possible combinations of each pair of input parameters. The number of test cases will be less than validating all possible combinations.

Someone may have question why we do not validate only single input parameter. Yes, you may do that way. However, it is up to your software's feature. Let's imagine if we have to validate MS Excel's formula which contains 10 input parameters which are used together to calculate for the result. Do you still use single input parameter? No, you can't. Then, someone may ask why we don't validate all possible input parameters. It will take too much manpower and this is why we need to use Pairwise Testing (All-pairs testing) to reduce testing manpower.

To get the list of test cases for software validation we need to use some algorithm to extract them because it is hard to do manually. There are many available free tools and commercial tools on the internet that can help you for this purpose.

I hope that this article will help you have more idea about this design method which can improve your software validation activity and discover hidden bugs easily.

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Related source: Basic concept: Black Box Technique: Pairwise Testing (All-pairs testing)

Danai Ongvuttivate

My personal blog: Testing A Software

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