TryHackMe! Basic Penetration Testing

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Top Security Penetration Testing Companies

Cybercrime is one of the world’s fastest-growing threats, with malicious actors constantly elaborating their methods of undetectable intrusion. According to Verizon’s Business 2020 Data Breach Investigations report, there has been a 100% increase in web app breaches, and stolen credentials were used in more than 80% of these cases. These statistics are worrying for many businesses that actively move their processes to the cloud and deal heavily with customers’ personal data.

Under these circumstances, companies need to run regular automated and manual tests to determine weak spots in their infrastructure, software, network and physical perimeter security. One of the most efficient testing methods is security penetration testing, or pentesting.

Pentesting is a benign hacking attempt, manual or automated, to break into the system and uncover its vulnerabilities before actual cyber criminals do it. This method is directed at testing the system security controls for their real-world effectiveness. It involves such stages as data collection, threat modeling, vulnerability scans, penetration tests, and so on.

To get proactive with their cyber security protection, many businesses cooperate with professional security testing companies that are able to comprehensively check the system, identify risks, fix vulnerabilities, and stay one step ahead of potential hackers.

The ranking criteria for security testing companies

When asking a professional software testing company to check your system’s security, in most cases you need to grant them access to sensitive information. For this reason, it’s important to choose a reliable company with an exceptional reputation, which will become your trusted partner.

Unsurprisingly, the market of security penetration testing companies is overwhelmingly crowded. To narrow down your search, we have analyzed hundreds of testing companies and compiled the list of top testing professionals. We have applied the following criteria:

• Pentesting expertise
• Portfolio
• Software QA experience
• Market penetration
• Online reviews

As a result, we’ve picked 30 skilled security testing companies and rated them accordingly.

1. a1qa

a1qa is a software testing company from Lakewood, CO, that has delivered over 1,500 successful projects and established 10 Centers of Excellence during their 17 years of operation. It has partnered with more than 500 companies, from smaller businesses to Fortune 500 giants. The company’s prominent customers include adidas, Kaspersky Lab, SAP, Yandex, Forex Club, and more.

a1qa specializes in delivering full-cycle QA and testing services, including comprehensive security penetration testing. Its expertise covers testing of web apps such as portals, ecommerce, media and e-learning platforms, games and online casinos, and line-of-business testing, such as CRM, collaboration, document management, and financial systems. The company also runs a specialized security testing lab.

2. QA Mentor

Founded in New York in 2010, QA Mentor has managed to establish a strong global presence with 12 testing centers around the world. Its team consists of 300 certified QA professionals that have successfully completed over 870 projects, including the ones for Amazon, eBay, Bosch, HTC, and more. The company offers more than 30 testing services, with cyber security penetration testing among them.

QA Mentor is recognized as a top software testing company by Clutch, GoodFirms, and Gartner.

3. UnderDefense

UnderDefense is a certified computer and network security company that was established in New York in 2016. It provides a wide range of testing services, with a special focus on security penetration testing. The company’s certified security testing team has performed hundreds of penetration tests, including compliance-specific tests, app and wireless network penetration testing, and social engineering security testing. UnderDefense has been repeatedly awarded by Clutch.

#testing #software-testing #security-testing #penetration-testing #top-software-testing-companies #software-testing-companies #good-company #code-quality

Testing Microservices Applications

The shift towards microservices and modular applications makes testing more important and more challenging at the same time. You have to make sure that the microservices running in containers perform well and as intended, but you can no longer rely on conventional testing strategies to get the job done.

This is where new testing approaches are needed. Testing your microservices applications require the right approach, a suitable set of tools, and immense attention to details. This article will guide you through the process of testing your microservices and talk about the challenges you will have to overcome along the way. Let’s get started, shall we?

A Brave New World

Traditionally, testing a monolith application meant configuring a test environment and setting up all of the application components in a way that matched the production environment. It took time to set up the testing environment, and there were a lot of complexities around the process.

Testing also requires the application to run in full. It is not possible to test monolith apps on a per-component basis, mainly because there is usually a base code that ties everything together, and the app is designed to run as a complete app to work properly.

Microservices running in containers offer one particular advantage: universal compatibility. You don’t have to match the testing environment with the deployment architecture exactly, and you can get away with testing individual components rather than the full app in some situations.

Of course, you will have to embrace the new cloud-native approach across the pipeline. Rather than creating critical dependencies between microservices, you need to treat each one as a semi-independent module.

The only monolith or centralized portion of the application is the database, but this too is an easy challenge to overcome. As long as you have a persistent database running on your test environment, you can perform tests at any time.

Keep in mind that there are additional things to focus on when testing microservices.

• Microservices rely on network communications to talk to each other, so network reliability and requirements must be part of the testing.
• Automation and infrastructure elements are now added as codes, and you have to make sure that they also run properly when microservices are pushed through the pipeline
• While containerization is universal, you still have to pay attention to specific dependencies and create a testing strategy that allows for those dependencies to be included

Test containers are the method of choice for many developers. Unlike monolith apps, which lets you use stubs and mocks for testing, microservices need to be tested in test containers. Many CI/CD pipelines actually integrate production microservices as part of the testing process.

Contract Testing as an Approach

As mentioned before, there are many ways to test microservices effectively, but the one approach that developers now use reliably is contract testing. Loosely coupled microservices can be tested in an effective and efficient way using contract testing, mainly because this testing approach focuses on contracts; in other words, it focuses on how components or microservices communicate with each other.

Syntax and semantics construct how components communicate with each other. By defining syntax and semantics in a standardized way and testing microservices based on their ability to generate the right message formats and meet behavioral expectations, you can rest assured knowing that the microservices will behave as intended when deployed.

Ways to Test Microservices

It is easy to fall into the trap of making testing microservices complicated, but there are ways to avoid this problem. Testing microservices doesn’t have to be complicated at all when you have the right strategy in place.

There are several ways to test microservices too, including:

• Unit testing: Which allows developers to test microservices in a granular way. It doesn’t limit testing to individual microservices, but rather allows developers to take a more granular approach such as testing individual features or runtimes.
• Integration testing: Which handles the testing of microservices in an interactive way. Microservices still need to work with each other when they are deployed, and integration testing is a key process in making sure that they do.
• End-to-end testing: Which⁠—as the name suggests⁠—tests microservices as a complete app. This type of testing enables the testing of features, UI, communications, and other components that construct the app.

What’s important to note is the fact that these testing approaches allow for asynchronous testing. After all, asynchronous development is what makes developing microservices very appealing in the first place. By allowing for asynchronous testing, you can also make sure that components or microservices can be updated independently to one another.

#blog #microservices #testing #caylent #contract testing #end-to-end testing #hoverfly #integration testing #microservices #microservices architecture #pact #testing #unit testing #vagrant #vcr

Software Testing 101: Regression Tests, Unit Tests, Integration Tests

Automation and segregation can help you build better software
If you write automated tests and deliver them to the customer, he can make sure the software is working properly. And, at the end of the day, he paid for it.

Ok. We can segregate or separate the tests according to some criteria. For example, “white box” tests are used to measure the internal quality of the software, in addition to the expected results. They are very useful to know the percentage of lines of code executed, the cyclomatic complexity and several other software metrics. Unit tests are white box tests.

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How to Do API Testing?

Nowadays API testing is an integral part of testing. There are a lot of tools like postman, insomnia, etc. There are many articles that ask what is API, What is API testing, but the problem is How to do API testing? What I need to validate.

Note: In this article, I am going to use postman assertions for all the examples since it is the most popular tool. But this article is not intended only for the postman tool.

Let’s directly jump to the topic.

Let’s consider you have an API endpoint example http://dzone.com/getuserDetails/{{username}} when you send the get request to that URL it returns the JSON response.

My API endpoint is http://dzone.com/getuserDetails/{{username}}

The response is in JSON format like below

JSON

{
  "jobTitle": "string",
  "userid": "string",
  "phoneNumber": "string",
  "password": "string",
  "email": "user@example.com",
  "firstName": "string",
  "lastName": "string",
  "userName": "string",
  "country": "string",
  "region": "string",
  "city": "string",
  "department": "string",
  "userType": 0
}

In the JSON we can see there are properties and associated values.

Now, For example, if we need details of the user with the username ‘ganeshhegde’ we need to send a **GET **request to **http://dzone.com/getuserDetails/ganeshhegde **

Now there are two scenarios.

1. Valid Usecase: User is available in the database and it returns user details with status code 200

2. Invalid Usecase: User is Unavailable/Invalid user in this case it returns status with code 404 with not found message.

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Top 10 Automation Testing Tools: 2020 Edition

The demand for delivering quality software faster — or “Quality at Speed” — requires organizations to search for solutions in Agile, continuous integration (CI), and DevOps methodologies. Test automation is an essential part of these aspects. The latest World Quality Report 2018–2019 suggests that test automation is the biggest bottleneck to deliver “Quality at Speed,” as it is an enabler of successful Agile and DevOps adoption.

Test automation cannot be realized without good tools; as they determine how automation is performed and whether the benefits of automation can be delivered. Test automation tools is a crucial component in the DevOps toolchain. The current test automation trends have increased in applying artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to offer advanced capabilities for test optimization, intelligent test generation, execution, and reporting. It will be worthwhile to understand which tools are best poised to take advantage of these trends.****

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