Pen Testing

Penetration testing or ethical hacking is testing an organization’s systems for exploitable vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

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:

The pen testing process can be broken down into five stages.

1. Planning and reconnaissance

The first stage involves:

2. Scanning

The next step is to understand how the target application will respond to various intrusion attempts. This is typically done using:

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:

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.