Cyber security is a very large field with many specialties. With a drastic increase in the number of companies experiencing a data breach or cyber incident, the need for cyber security services could not be greater.

This article will touch on some of the core services that cyber security companies offer, and how they are utilised to benefit businesses.

Cyber security services can be broken down into different categories. There are companies which offer penetration testing. Penetration testing is a security test of your IT systems, servers, computers and software applications too. It is also called an ethical hack – meaning a hack with permission of the owner of the IT systems.

It is an ideal way to see how vulnerable your business is to a hacker and exposes your weaknesses before real hackers do. Therefore, from this it can reveal which areas of security you need to invest in to minimise the risk of a hack.

Secondly, some companies may solely focus on security consultancy. They use their expertise to advise companies on how to behave regarding information security.

Consultants may opt to provide guidance for not only IT infrastructure, but also policies, procedures security best practices and even security accreditations such as ISO 27001. This is achieved by identifying and securing any network weaknesses, as well as providing recommendations for hardware and software upgrades.

Some companies however, may focus their services on reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is the process of deconstructing a complete application to find out exactly how it works.

For example, a cyber security company may take a piece of malware apart to study it, determine the technique used, and then develop tools to combat the techniques used by the malware developers and ultimately minimise the risk of a similar attack.