Software testing is essential

Integrating reliable software should be the usual axiom for every company but sadly this isn’t the case. Organisations should strive to understand the kind of security testing that they can benefit from in their battle to prevent cyber-attacks.

Take Dixons Carphone for example the Selenium Web-Driver after they were recently victims of a major cyber-attack, which saw a huge breach involving 5.9 million payment cards and 1.2 million personal data records.

It said an investigation indicated there was an attempt, going back to July last year, to compromise data on credit cards in one of the processing systems of Currys PC World and Dixons Travel stores.

It said 5.8 million of these cards had chip and pin protection and the data accessed contained neither pin codes, card verification values nor any authentication data that would enable cardholder identification or purchases to be made.

However, it said 105,000 non-EU issued payment cards which do not have chip and pin protection had been compromised. Dixons Carphone immediately notified the relevant card companies so that they could protect customers. It’s worrying that major cyber-attacks like this are still so common and that nothing seems to be done to prevent them from happening – especially in global firms.

Cyber criminals are finding it easier to access Unit Testing and Dixons Carphone must now look at whether their defensive software is doing its job properly. A repeat of what happened would be a mortal blow to their business. The only way to prevent that happening again is to properly integrate and test the software.

People are too overly-focused on scanning for known vulnerabilities in software after it has been released, and under-focused on poor software development practices that lead to vulnerable applications that hackers can exploit.

This is where thorough software testing is essential. Pulling software testing into company’s practices doesn’t have to be difficult. A good starting point is to bring in software experts and security engineers into planning sessions. Next, ensure each phase of your pipeline has a quality gate and software quality criteria that should be met in order to move to the next phase of your pipeline.