With thanks to Adrian Furtuna, Founder and CEO of Pentest-Tools.com, Aviva Zacks of Safety Detective found out why he was his company’s first customer.
Safety Detectives: What motivated you to start Pentest-Tools.com?
Adrian Furtuna: My background is in computer science, and before starting Pentest-Tools.com, I worked for about ten years doing penetration testing. During that time, I realized that many of the tasks could have been automated and done a little bit easier than the manual approach that most pentesters preferred.
I started to create this platform to make my life and job easier. So this was the main motivation.
SD: What is the main focus of your company?
AF: The main focus of our company is to provide a platform for pentesters all around the globe to deliver their own services to their own customers. Our platform actually helps pentesters perform the security testing process in a much easier way than the classical approach and with reduced costs for them.
SD: What kinds of companies do you market your platform to?
AF: Our main customers are consulting companies that offer security testing and penetration testing services for their own customers. And also, companies that have internal security teams which do security testing and pentesting for their own organization.
SD: Does your company have competition in this area, or do you feel that what you offer is unique?
AF: We have some competition on some aspects of our platform, but we are unique in terms of the offer we provide for our customers—the pentesters—meaning that, using our platform, pentesters can do a full security assessment from the initial phase of the information gathering, continuing with web application testing, network security testing and exploitation. In the end, they can also produce the final report for their customers using Pentest-Tools.com. We have the full range of tools and capabilities to perform a penetration test.
Another thing that differentiates us from our competitors is that most of the tools built into our platform are created by our team. And they have similar or better results than the tools that are on the market right now.
Besides the features of the platform, most of the tools have been written by our team, and the others are open-source tools that we have integrated within our platform.
SD: What do you feel are the worst cyberthreats today?
AF: Besides human weakness, cyberthreats are caused by new vulnerabilities that appear every day. But the threats that actually exploit these vulnerabilities originate around hacking groups which are motivated by financial interest. I think the worst threat at the moment revolves around ransomware because there isn’t always a way to decrypt the files that have been encrypted by the attackers – although sometimes it can be possible to recover your files without paying the ransom. But, if the ransomware is good, then you have no way of recovering your files. Besides doing proactive tests to periodically check the security of their company, organizations also need to take preventive measures like doing backups and having a disaster recovery center that can always kick in when some type of crisis happens.
SD: Where do you feel that cybersecurity is headed now that we’re living through this pandemic?
AF: It’s a bit hard to predict, but I would say that cybersecurity is moving towards more home systems rather than company networks. This is because, until now, since employees were working from the office, it was much easier for companies to have their data stored only inside the network, but, right now, almost everybody is working from home. Companies have had to open a lot of doors to the network and the data sits on employees’ computers on their home networks, which are neither very well monitored nor secure.