Penetration testing or ethical hacking is testing an organization’s systems for exploitable vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Such testing is crucial to understanding whether the organization’s information systems are hardened or not. A hardened information system must be able to withstand malicious attacks. Penetration testing challenges a network's security. Given the value of a business’s network, it is imperative that businesses consult with experts before pen testing. A penetration test starts with the security professional enumerating the target network to find vulnerable systems and/or accounts. This means scanning each system on the network for open ports that have services running on them. It is extremely rare that an entire network has every service configured correctly, properly password-protected, and fully patched. Once the penetration tester has a good understanding of the network and the vulnerabilities that are present, he/she will use a penetration testing tool to exploit a vulnerability in order to gain unwelcome access. A penetration test is a crucial component to network security. Through these tests a business can identify:
- Security vulnerabilities before a hacker does
- Gaps in information security compliance
- The response time of their information security team, i.e. how long it takes the team to realize that there is a breach and mitigate the impact
- The potential real-world effect of a data breach or cybersecurity attack
- Actionable remediation guidance
The pen testing process can be broken down into five stages.
1. Planning and reconnaissance
The first stage involves:
- Defining the scope and goals of a test, including the systems to be addressed and the testing methods to be used.
- Gathering intelligence (e.g., network and domain names, mail server) to better understand how a target works and its potential vulnerabilities.
2. Scanning
The next step is to understand how the target application will respond to various intrusion attempts. This is typically done using:
- Static analysis – Inspecting an application’s code to estimate the way it behaves while running. These tools can scan the entirety of the code in a single pass.
- Dynamic analysis – Inspecting an application’s code in a running state. This is a more practical way of scanning, as it provides a real-time view into an application’s performance.
3. Gaining Access
This stage uses web application attacks, such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection and backdoors, to uncover a target’s vulnerabilities. Testers then try and exploit these vulnerabilities, typically by escalating privileges, stealing data, intercepting traffic, etc., to understand the damage they can cause.
4. Maintaining access
The goal of this stage is to see if the vulnerability can be used to achieve a persistent presence in the exploited system— long enough for a bad actor to gain in-depth access. The idea is to imitate advanced persistent threats, which often remain in a system for months in order to steal an organization’s most sensitive data.
5. Analysis
The results of the penetration test are then compiled into a report detailing:
- Specific vulnerabilities that were exploited
- Sensitive data that was accessed
- The amount of time the pen tester was able to remain in the system undetected
This information is analyzed by security personnel to help configure an enterprise’s Web application firewall settings and other application security solutions to patch vulnerabilities and protect against future attacks.
