Regretfully, cyberattacks are on the rise, forcing organizations to keep a steady hand to protect data against hackers and black hats. As per a report by leading analyst firm of Cybersecurity Ventures, the total global damages from cybercrime could reach $10.5 trillion in 2024, a 30% year-on-year increase from 2023.

Performing regular vulnerability exploitations, including techniques such as vulnerability scanning – has become one of the key tools in this struggle. It can simulate the actions of real hackers, identifying real flaws and providing a good analysis of the system's protection. 

Well, let's take a closer look at what pen testing is, what it represents, and define why it's so relevant to any business today.

What is penetration testing

Pen testing means a specific type of exploit testing used to pinpoint and check weak points in the security of the client's organization. Such an audit is generally used for analyzing the possibility of exploiting these “weak points” from a cybercriminal's point of view. 

The definition involves a specialized pen testers team, they simulate hacking incidents. This allows them to promptly and accurately find flaws and generally weak points of the enterprise security system, where every hacker can take advantage of data gained. 

Besides that, pentesting has a number of key advantages it can offer to an organization:

• Safety strategy development: Pen evaluation identifies weaknesses and hence helps in formulating an efficient protection strategy.

• Improve incident response: Improve the response capability toward security incidents.

• Reducing costs: Reduces recovery costs by identifying and eliminating vulnerabilities much earlier.

• Increased trust by customers: Provides confidence and good faith that one takes security seriously.

• Security systems testing: Checks the availability of the value of money in current security.

• Protection of information of customers: Provides confidentiality, availability, and integrity of important info.

Given that new exploits and hacker attacks appear all the time, such “simulated” testing should be performed regularly. For financial organizations – at least double a year.

Who performs pentests

In the world of computer hardware security, no work is more interesting and simultaneously challenging than being a professional penetration tester - or ethical hacker, as this occupation is also called. Pen testers are mostly paid to (legally) hack into a computer network. In a pen test, IT systems or networks are subjected to extensive testing designed to determine their susceptibility to attack. Pen test team uses practices and techniques that are used by real hackers.

Penetration testers team perform a test by breaching an application, IT infrastructure, cloud platform, or microservice to pinpoint vulnerabilities that a “bad” (unethical) hacker could exploit to attack the organization. An organization that orders ethical attack from an experienced pen tester receives a report with a complete description list of vulnerabilities and recommendations on how to fix them.

Penetration test: categorization by placement

Depending on the threat the customer is interested in—the risk of hacking disruption inside the company or the possibility from the outside—specialists implement one of the following variations of pen testing:

External pen test

External penetration test simulates the ability of an attacker to gain access from outside resources to the organizational network. Or, to retrieve sensitive data from the public–facing resources, such as web applications or email servers.

Internal pen test

Inside-based penetration test simulates a cyber attack that has already bypassed the security perimeter. These tactics address how an attacker, or an insider, can see and the actions they can do internally, such as moving from one network to another, intercepting inside communications, and so on. An enclosed pen test will help model the damage an attacker can do, once they've breached your system.

Local penetration testing

A local pen test identifies vulnerabilities within a specific physical location, such as an office or sensitive data center. This form of attack simulation researches the security of systems that are directly accessible to employees, thus enabling specialists to find the weak points that might be exploited by insiders or uncertified personnel.

Online penetration testing

Web testing basically focuses on how well online offerings, applications, and platforms have secured themselves. In that respect, applications, APIs, and cloud solutions are evaluated for vulnerabilities a hacker might utilize. This aims at enabling resources to remain safe from possible breaches.

Penetration test types

There are many different tactics of pen evaluations to choose from, depending on which systems and components are being tested. 

Infrastructure or network pen testing

This example is a type of pen test, designed to test your network and infrastructure for failure points and the effectiveness of your existing security regulations. Pentesters team who will attempt to single out and exploit system integrity misconfigurations, and assess patch level and threat, such as open ports and weak credentials. They may also make simulated malware attack and analyze user behavior under various hacker attack scenarios.

Cloud pen testing

Pentesters team will assess and single out security weaknesses within the cloud to evaluate the strength of your cloud's security posture. Cloud pen testing includes exposing weak access controls to your cloud and insecure functionality. Pentesters team can assess failure points within cloud infrastructures, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google's GCP, and IBM Cloud, meaning they provide a comprehensive evaluation of your cloud environment's defenses.

Mobile application testing

Penetration testers team are able to pinpoint potential threats, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations in iOS and Android applications. This type of pen test is used for improving the software lifecycle of your mobile applications.

Web application testing

This is an example of a penetration test of your website's API and application for security weaknesses, such as insecure functionality and misconfigurations. Web application pen tests will look for all critical risks, including the OWASP Top 10, as well as risks related to user credentials.

Application programming interface pen test

This means that it becomes imperative to have application programming interface pen testing for the identification of vulnerabilities and, further, for secure integration of APIs into your infrastructure. The pentesters assess potential attack vectors against the protection controls in the API access authentication, authorization, sensitive data validation, and other safety controls to ensure that access is properly managed.

IoT pen test

As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices goes on increasing, their systems require penetration testing. The pentester will test the safety of IoT devices, their communication over a network, and the entire infrastructure of IoT to discover vulnerabilities and reassure the integrity of your ecosystem connected by things.

Scenarios for running a penetration test

A pen evaluation can be organized according to one of several scenarios. Depending on the needs of the organization, pen testers may employ white/black or gray-box penetration testing ways, each of which testers use to evaluate safety of the target systems in different ways. Which one pen testing is right for your company will be chosen by specialists. Let's take a closer look at each of them.

Knowledge-based (white-box) pen testing

It’s necessary to scan the resistance of the info security system to breaches using an ordinary employee of the client company, intrusions by a user with administrator access or even by a developer. This approach allows us to determine the maximum number of vulnerabilities. The contractor has detailed info about the client and the peculiarities of its IT infrastructure, including source code data.

Blind (black-box) pen testing

This approach is used to test the client's systems or website against standard intrusion and exploitation attempts. Pen testers don’t obtain any info about the organization beyond the info available in public sources and essentially act as hackers.

Hybrid (gray-box) pen testing

Gray-box pen testers perform a simulation of a targeted attack from the outside involving the company's employees. The approach makes it possible to assess the effectiveness of the defense systems in general, and to understand whether an ordinary user can cause significant damage to the company's IT infrastructure if he or she so chooses.

The difference between manual and automated pen testing

The difference between manual and automated pen testing, which can be used to assess safety, is an important consideration for businesses looking to protect their assets. Manual testing relies on skilled professionals to identify complex vulnerabilities, whereas automated uses tools to quickly scan for common security flaws and target attack vectors. 

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7 pentest stages

Actually, to start a penetration test is to prepare for some kind of mission. Let’s break this process down into steps for the most important processes:

Step 1: Information Gathering

This could be described as the homework stage. Penetration testers team will gather info about the target website: IP addresses, domain info, details about the employees in the organization to create a full profile etc.

Step 2: Reconnaissance

This is where one conducts a stealthy observation. The penetration tester, employing ways of both passive and active methods, draws deeper inside the system by mapping the network and discovering possible entry points.

Step 3: Discovery and Scanning

The basis here is to find out the live hosts running on the target system. Used stuff, such as scanners, are then used to scan the target environment and bring up the systems in play with their configurations. Scanners help provide insights into target safety issues.

Step 4: Vulnerability Assessment

Now it's time for a deep dive. Testers look through the scanned data for potential vulnerabilities that could be leveraged, further defining the risk level of each.

Step 5: Exploitation

Gloves off! Phase, where identified vulnerabilities are actually attempted to be exploited in an effort to gain unauthorized access by simulating actual attackers actions.

Step 6: Final Analysis and Review

When the dust finally settles, it is time to reflect. The pen testers compile their findings into one report on how vulnerabilities could be exploited and the potential impact there might be for the organization.

Step 7: Utilize the Testing Results

The grand finale is putting these insights to work. An organization acts upon such gained insights to firm up their defense, patch the identified vulnerabilities, and work on enhancing the overall safety posture.

Tools for Ethical Attack

Efficient attack simulation relies on a variety of specialized testing technology and tools using in the detection of vulnerabilities and handling safety process:

• specialized operating systems;
• reconnaissance utilities;
• port and service finding applications;
• vulnerability scanning utilities;
• packet analyzers;
• metasploit;
• proxy applications;
• password cracking utilities;
• exploitation tools.

Conclusion

Security pen tests should be performed in different volumes and have their own specifics. Their frequency and various features are regulated by industry standards, but in addition there are a number of cases when it is advisable to perform an unscheduled test. Pen test allows your company to save money by optimizing IS costs. It identifies real problems and helps to build an effective strategy to eliminate them.

A pen test is the first step in improving an organization's information assurance. This test sets the direction in which the organization should move to make access from the outside as difficult as possible and to prevent unlawful actions from within.

Contact Datami today to schedule a pen test and strengthen your security!