How To Do Security Testing: Best Practices

The industry of software has a huge reputation and presence in almost every sector.
Most businesses utilize IT solutions and web-based systems to manage and maintain their business. The banking, payments, stock, purchasing and selling, and many other activities are conducted digitally these days.

The rise of digital business has made security testing extremely important. This article will show you the major steps to perform security testing.
1. Test The Accessibility
Access security should be your first priority to ensure the safety of your business and your customers.
Accessibility includes authentication and authorization. You decide who will get the accessibility and how much accessibility is allowed to an authenticated person.
This helps in ensuring that your data stays safe from internal and external breaches.
To conduct the accessibility test, you are required to test the roles and responsibilities of people in your company.
Hire a tester who is qualified for the job. He or she will generate multiple user accounts, including different roles.
security testing those generated accounts will help in ensuring the security level in terms of accessibility.
The same test can also include password quality, default login capacities, captcha test, and other password and login related tests.
2. Test The Protection Level of Data
The security of your data depends on:

• Data visibility and usability
• Data storage

While data visibility is about how much data is visible to users, the data storage involves the security of your database.
Proper security testing measures are required to ensure the effectiveness of data storage. However, you have to test first to check the vulnerabilities.
A professional tester can test the database for all kinds of critical data such as user account, passwords, billing and others.
It is important that the database stores all the important data. The transmission of data should be encrypted as well. The qualified tester also checks the ease of decryption of the encrypted data.
3. Test For Malicious Script
Hackers utilize XSS and SQL injection to hack a website. A malicious script is injected into the system of a site, which allows the hacker to control or manipulate the hacked website.

A tester can ensure the safety of your site against these practices.
The tester can check the maximum lengths allowed for the input fields. This restriction doesn’t allow a hacker to include these malicious scripts.
4. Test The Access Points
In today’s market, collaboration is the way of doing business. Many businesses collaborate on a digital level by providing services in a collaborative way.

Also Read : How to Test a Bank ERP System

For instance, a stock trading app has to provide consistent access to the latest data to the users and new visitors as well. But this open access also presents the risk of unwanted breach.
To immune from such attacks, a tester can check the entry points of the app.
The professional tester evaluates and ensures that all the access requests come from reliable IPs or application.
If not, the app system should have the capacity to reject those requests.
5. Test The Session Management
Session on the web includes the response transactions between your web server and the browser utilized by a user.
Testing the session management involves multiple actions such as expiry time of the session after a certain idle period, maximum lifetime of termination, session end time after a user logs out and others.
6. Test The Error Handling
Testing the error codes is important too. This includes the errors of 408, 400, 404, and others.
The tester can perform directed actions to reach such pages and ensure that the presented page doesn’t contain any critical data or information.
This helps in ensuring that all the data presented on error pages are safe and can’t help the hackers.
This test also includes the checkup of the stack traces, which can help the potential hackers to breach.
7. Test For Other Functionalities
Other functionalities that require testing are the file uploads and payments. These functions require thorough testing.

Any malicious file should be restricted. Also, the tester should check the vulnerabilities associated with the payments such as buffer overflows, insecure storage, password guessing, and other issues.
Apart from the mentioned tests, a professional tester can recommend others, according to the business model you have.
Conducting the tests in the mentioned way will help you ensure a comprehensive security of your digital presence.