Astra Pentest Reviewed – Easy, Continuous Vulnerability Scanning & Compliance

Poorly secured or (sometimes) misconfigured applications often get hacked, and sensitive information gets stolen from the companies every single day.

Here are some worrying real-world stats:

• According to IBM, In 2021, the average cost of a data breach increased to $4.37 million per data breach incident.
• A study by Accenture states that nearly 43% of cyberattacks target small and medium enterprises.

To prevent such damage and incoming threats to any company, a thorough vulnerability scanning and penetration testing of its internet-facing assets are very much required so that all vulnerabilities in applications are uncovered before hackers come looking for them.

That’s where Astra Pentest comes into play.

How Does Astra Pentest Help?

Astra’s Pentest platform makes the otherwise tedious process of finding vulnerabilities super simple and continuous. It makes your applications proactively secure.

It offers businesses a holistic platform that includes Automated and Continuous Vulnerability Scanning, Manual Penetration Testing, Risk-based Vulnerability Management, DevOps (CI/CD) Integrations, separate Pentest Compliance Test Cases for compliances like SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA, and much more.

With Astra Pentest, your engineering team and Astra’s security engineers can easily collaborate, manage and secure your apps with one unified platform.

Who Can Benefit from Astra Pentest?

Astra Security caters to a wide range of companies from every industry verticals, including healthcare, financial services, E-commerce, Blockchain & others. 3000 Companies like SpiceJet, Ford, Agora, Cosmopolitan, Dream11, Gillette, and OOONA rely on Astra Pentest for securing their business.

CTOs, CIOs, IT Managers, CISO’S and Compliance Professionals from companies of any size can benefit from Astra Security’s award-winning Astra Pentest solution.

With Astra Pentest, customers can also maintain continuous compliance like ISO 27001, SOC2, PCI-DSS & HIPAA through regular security scans, which check for vulnerabilities that could lead to failure of these compliances.

What Does Astra Pentest Include?

With Astra Pentest, customers get a complete security solution for identifying and fixing up vulnerabilities and security weaknesses in their systems. On top of that, the key features offered by Astra Pentest provide a seamless experience for the engineering and management teams to collaborate for their security objectives.

Astra Pentest has the following key features:

• Automated Vulnerability Scanner with 3000 tests
• Mix of automated and manual pentesting
• Integrations with CI/CD, JIRA & other apps
• Easy vulnerability management and collaboration
• Compliance specific tests & view for SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA etc.
• Publicly verifiable pentest certificate
• Fixing collaboration with security experts within the platform

Now, let’s look at Astra’s Pentest features in detail.

Automated Vulnerability Scanner

A continuous vulnerability scanner that automatically tests your system for over 3000 test cases and offers detailed scan reports. Astra’s vulnerability scanner is also designed to scan pages behind the login, making it ideal for SaaS applications.

Astra’s Automated Vulnerability Scanner works in five different steps:

• Scan your application for vulnerabilities and misconfiguration issues
• Risk-grading is done for each vulnerability considering the risk score, severity and impact
• Vulnerabilities are categorized based on risk-score and prioritized for developers to fix them
• Reporting for each vulnerability scan is prepared and kept for future references
• Integrate the scanner with your CI/CD pipeline for continuous scans, never go into production with vulnerabilities

A Mix of Automated and Manual Penetration Testing

Security engineers at Astra help you identify and patch security gaps in your system by conducting hacker-style testing using a set of automated tools and manual efforts. In this, a security engineer from Astra tries to hack into your system or bypass established defenses by exploiting a potential vulnerability or security weakness. With a mix of automated and manual pentesting, Astra’s entire vulnerability assessment & penetration test (VAPT) process ensures zero false positives.

Manual testing can help you discover flaws in your system that get unnoticed in automated scanning. It detects flaws such as business logic errors, issues due to poor code, etc.

Easy Vulnerability Management & Collaboration

The Vulnerability Management dashboard in Astra Pentest offers you an easy way to identify, classify, and remediate vulnerabilities. A detailed analysis is provided to you for each discovered vulnerability along with the potential impact in dollar value, severity, risk score of the vulnerability, CVSS Score, steps to reproduce, video POCs suggestions to fix that vulnerability, and much more.

The vulnerability management dashboard also allows you to collaborate with your internal team and Astra’s security engineers (with options to add comments, tag users, decide access controls, resolution center etc.)

Compliance Security Tests & Reporting

A shiny-new compliance dashboard in Astra Pentest allows you to check where your application stands concerning various security compliance specific to your industry. Currently, the available compliance tests for security are – ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.

Integrations with CI/CD and Other Apps

CI/CD Integration options to connect your Pentest project with your GitHub or GitLab pipelines. This will ensure an automated and continuous audit for your application whenever you deploy—transitioning your DevOps into DevSecOps.

You can also connect your Jira project with Astra Pentest to add discovered vulnerabilities as Jira issues to your Jira project.

Publicly Verifiable Pentest Certificate

Upon every successful pentest, you will receive an industry-recognized publicly verifiable certificate of pentest. You can download it yourself from your Astra Pentests’ main dashboard.

This publicly verifiable certificate helps you build trust among your existing and new customers. It can also be used to achieve certain compliance.

Fixing Collaboration with Security Experts within the Platform

Users can raise a support query within the dashboard by using the “Need Help?” section. Further, to discuss, assign, and ask for help about any specific vulnerability, the dev teams can collaborate with security experts from Astra within the platform – by simply going to the resolution center and commenting on the issue.

Furthermore, Astra Security has a resource center that provides helpful articles to help you out with all product features and the questions that you got.

What Customers are Saying about Astra Pentest?

Adding a few screenshots of reviews here (source):

Summing Up

Organizations should consider using both vulnerability scanning and penetration testing solutions to ensure comprehensive security coverage. Vulnerability scanning can help you identify weak spots in your system before an attacker does, while penetration testing can help you validate the effectiveness of your security controls.

When used together, these two tools can provide a powerful defense against today’s threats. Ensure your organization is taking advantage of both vulnerability scanning and penetration testing solutions to stay ahead of the curve.