5 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Conducting Security Testing

Security testing is one of the most important aspects of the software development life cycle. It ensures that your application has no security flaws or vulnerabilities. A common misconception is that a good tester will find any bugs and problems in an application. That is not always true.

There are many mistakes you can commit while conducting security testing which may lead to critical consequences such as breaking confidentiality, availability, or integrity. Here are 5 common security testing mistakes you should avoid:

1) Not Understanding Your Application’s Functionality

2) Testing for Security Flaws in Non-Security Features

3) Ignoring Security Requirements for External APIs

4) Using Insufficient Resources for Security Testing

5) Failure to Test After Development Changes

Step 1 – Discovery: The step involves analyzing system based on its scope, proposed and making a checklist of possible threats at each stage.

Step 2 – Vulnerability Scan: The system is run against prepared vulnerabilities to define risk level using automated tools.

Step 3 – Vulnerability Assessment: Considering existing and potential risks in the framework and tracking it to the environment under test mandate.

Step 4 – Security Assessment: Broadly assessing vulnerabilities and manually verifying it confirm exposure. It also involves assessing system response, file logs, codes, error messages, and broad coverage to check system defects.

Step 5 – Penetration Test: Using SQL injection and cross site scripting techniques to simulate malicious attack. This helps in identifying system’s ability to resist unauthorized access, data integrity,seamless operation, consistency, and problem solving abilities.

Step 6 – Security Audit: Specifying risk functions, control issues, compliance difficulties, areas reported during the security testing.

Step 7 – Security Review: Detailed analysis and information validation in such a way that ensures that the security standards are implemented and work in a seamless way through gap analysis, review of code and design documents, and evaluation of architecture diagrams.