How Are Penetration Testing Companies In The USA?

Intro

Penetration Testing Companies in the USA – The Federal Government has a very stringent approach towards dealing with cybercrime. According to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), hacking can incur a sentence of upto 20 years in prison. One would think, such laws have deterred the blackhat hackers. It appears, they have not.

$4.2 billion was lost to cybercrimes in the USA alone in 2020. According to a report, the global cost of cyber security breaches will reach $ 10.5 trillion per year by 2025. The situation does look bleak, but there is a silver lining. Most of the mass cyber attacks are targeted towards websites with a known set of vulnerabilities. You can defend your business against these attacks with the help of the top Penetration Testing companies in the USA. And this article will help you find them, discover their services, assess their suitability.

What Is Penetration Testing?

Penetration Testing is the process of simulating a hack against a network, a website, or an application, under well defined rules of engagement, to find and assess security vulnerabilities and loopholes.

Your organization hires security experts to try and break into your systems by exploiting certain vulnerabilities.

How Exactly Does a Penetration Test help?

It is more likely than not that your website or application has security vulnerabilities. It is difficult to build an inherently security-aware team and very easy to forget about an outdated theme or a Plugin that has become vulnerable. You have a business to run, and worrying about your security posture, and ensuring all the users of your network are super careful, does not help you.

The average cost of a security breach in the United States of America is over $9 million. Add business downtime, data loss, and loss of reputation to that, and the value of Penetration Testing for a business dawns upon you. The list of benefits of getting a Pentest done by one of the top Penetration Testing companies in the USA  would look somewhat like this,

• Get a clear picture of existing security threats in your systems.
• Assess the vulnerabilities and understand how much risk they pose to the business assets.
• Fix the vulnerabilities to restore the digital health of the organization.
• Protect customer data as well as critical information from hackers.
• Maintain compliance with global security standards.

Who needs Penetration Testing?

Well, who does not? If you are running a business on a digital platform, getting a Pentest done from time to time is a good idea. However, there are certain sectors that have mandated regular security testing including Penetration Testing as part of their compliance programs. For instance,

• Any provider of IT services is supposed to have SOC2 Type 2 compliance, which requires Penetration Testing.
• The Payment card companies have to undergo Pentesting to comply with the PCI DSS.
• The healthcare institutes need Pentest certificates to comply with HIPAA.

Even if your business does not fall under these categories, you should engage in Penetration Testing of your Website, Application, or Network, to stay out of the Hackers’ radar.

Top Penetration Testing Companies in the USA

Now that we have covered what Penetration Testing is and how it helps your business, let us take a look at the top Penetration Testing Companies in the USA.

1. Astra Security

They started by winning the French Tech Ticket, and now have bases in France, the USA, and India with their clientele spread across the globe. Astra has made security incredibly simple for its customers. They have two core products – a Web Application Firewall, and a Penetration Testing Suite. Let us learn a bit about the latter.

Astra Pentest Suite

Complete with a progressive web app, the Astra Pentest suite comes with some crazy conveniences. For instance,

• Every customer is provided with a Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing dashboard.
• The vulnerabilities start appearing on your dashboard 2 days into a 4-7 day security audit.
• The very same dashboard helps you interact with the security engineers during remediation of the identified vulnerabilities.
• Astra provides you with a login recorder which you can use to record and upload your login. It allows the automatic scanner to stay logged in during a scan.
• They give you a solid Pentest report with CVSS scores for vulnerabilities, detailed guidelines for remediation, with video POCs.
• Optimized security audits for single page applications.

These features accompanied by 2500+ tests, a dedicated security team, and globally acknowledged Pentest certifications for ISO27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, etc. makes Astra one of the best Penetration Testing companies in the USA and by extension in the world.

Astra’s Ultimate Selling Points

The VAPT dashboard: Clients love how simple the Pentest process is with Astra. They have hardly anything to worry about once they get access to the dashboard. They are provided with a clear visualization of the vulnerability analysis, along with the reports.

The Pentest report: Astra’s Pentest report is quick, comprehensive, efficient, and a great aid to the developers trying to fix the vulnerabilities. With video POCs, detailed guidelines, in-call assistance from security engineers, they make the job really easy for you.      

2. Probely

Probley’s Web Vulnerability Scanner for APIs, websites, and networks is a strong player in the US cyber security industry. The enterprise edition of their Vulnerability Scanner covers a lot of ground, and gives you a lot of control over how the security audits are performed and how the targets are chosen. They would definitely be among the penetration companies on any list.

Let us look at some of Probely’s cool offerings

Internal target scanning: The vulnerability scanner can scan all the sites hosted on your private or internal network. It can perform the scans from different Geographical locations.

Access based on least privilege: Probely lets you grant minimum access to the security testers based on least privilege permissions.

Manage large number of APIs: The enterprise edition of Probely is designed to help you handle a large number of APIs hosted on a single network.

Security management dashboard: Probely lets you manage all the attack surfaces of your entire network from a single dashboard loaded with overview, metrics, and records.  

3. Detectify

This company follows a four-step approach to cyber security and vulnerability assessment : discover, assess, prioritize, and remediate.

Each of these steps hold a lot of meaning to the security posture of a company. You may often operate without fully realizing what internet facing assets are in place. Detectify helps you discover those assets, find out the anomalies, prioritize the ones that pose maximum threat, and treat the problems.

Let us see what they bring on to the table.

Simple surface monitoring: You can get started with this really fast and monitor all your internet facing assets without much of a hassle. You can find the vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and fix them.

Application scanning: Detectify’s automatic application scanner scans your application for known vulnerabilities during the development and production stages and alerts you on finding anything.

Knowledge of latest vulnerabilities: The latest findings by the ethical hacker communities are fed into Detectify’s scanners, thus giving you early access to latest vulnerabilities.

4. Acunetix

Acunetix puts a lot of stress on creating an effortless solution for its customers. They focus on accurate identification and speedy recovery of vulnerabilities. They use a combination of DAST and IAST to locate 7000+ vulnerabilities.

Here are some highlights

Automation galore: Acunetix allows you to automate a long list of operations like finding vulnerabilities, researching zero days, triaging vulnerabilities, and guiding devs through remediation.

Quick scan results: They promise you 90% of the scan results half way through the scan. The vulnerabilities are identified and categorized based on risk just as they are found.

Automatic detection of false positives: They save you hours on confirming vulnerabilities. And the remediation guidelines pinpoint the exact lines of code that require fixing.

Scan hard to reach places: Acunetix lets you scan difficult to reach places like password protected areas, code heavy sites, single page applications, and multi-level forms.

5. Cipher Security

Cipher Security is one of the bigger players on the global cyber security stage. Their Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and Managed Security Services (MSS) are quite well regarded. You can find a number of different solutions on their website like technology integration, and Governance and risk compliance.

A few important things about Cipher

• They have dedicated and tailored services for a wide array of industries like Finance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Logistics, and Gaming.
• They dedicate a fair amount of time and effort to research and development around vulnerability detection and remediation.

6. Breachlock

Breachlock provides Penetration Testing as a Service. Their primary focus is on scalability, agility, and cost effectiveness. They will conduct manual Penetration Testing of your systems and provide you with both online and offline reports. Once you have fixed the vulnerabilities, they will retest the fixes and certify your organization. This will be followed up by monthly automated scans to detect new breaches.

Some highlights

• You can choose between one time Pentest and continued Pentest. If you opt for an annual program, you will have the prerogative to have a Pentest conducted.
• With automated patch validation, and retesting, Breachlock makes it easy to scale.
• Breachlock is integrated with DevOps tools such as JIRA and Slack. It makes it easier to stick to a development timeline when it comes to remediation.

Conclusion

Finding a Pentesting company that suits your needs is more about understanding their usual workflow and policies than just going through their offers and prices. You should always look for a Penetration Testing Company that offers comprehensive solutions – detailed scan, accurate report, solid remediation support and collaboration, and a globally acknowledged certification.