Each year my team conducts hundreds of Penetration Tests in a wide variety of industries, ranging from Healthcare to Retail, Finance to Manufacturing, and many more. The team analyzed data collected from each of our penetration tests at SecureState since 2011 and found common themes in the methods of compromise utilized to break into organizations and compromise sensitive information. As a result, SecureState has issued a new report that expands on the attack vectors identified and suggests ways organizations can defend themselves against such attack vectors. SecureState’s 2014 Attack Vectors Report revealed the following Top 5 methods of compromise:

1. Weak Passwords
2. Web Management Consoles
3. Missing Patches and System Misconfigurations
4. Application Vulnerabilities
5. Social Engineering

The full report is available for download on the SecureState website. I also presented a webinar (watch the replay here) with Defense team lead Robert Miller, expanding on the report’s findings and offering additional advice to organizations on how to defend against these attack vectors. I highly recommend you download this report to see where your organization stands in regards to these attack vectors.

What’s the bottom line?
The current mindset of many organizations is to only react after an attack or breach has already occurred. However, based on our findings and what the current onslaught of recent breaches have shown us, it’s clear that organizations face the same attacks month after month. Rather than be reactive, the defensive mindset needs to change to a proactive one. Consider focusing time, money and resources on your defensive controls before a penetration test occurs.

A penetration test should be your final step to ensure your defense can withstand an attack and to adjust your defenses if necessary. We’ve seen it time and time again where organizations only conduct an annual penetration test and expect that remediating tactical issues from the penetration test will improve their security posture. This needs to stop! Build and test your defensive controls first, then test to see how these controls hold up. Most of these controls are a mix of tactical and strategic, but reactively focused. By taking a proactive stance on defense, your organization will become much more secure and the time, money and resources spent will provide much more value to the business.

Defend it before you hack it.

Cross-posted from the SecureState Blog