Penetration testing has emerged as a crucial tool in cybersecurity assessments, proving invaluable by offering a preview of potential hacker attack vectors. But how do these tests work behind the scenes? Understanding the technology you’re utilizing is essential. Much like how we explored vulnerability assessments last month, let’s delve into penetration tests.
What is Penetration Testing?
Before diving into the details, it’s essential to understand what a penetration test, or pen test, actually is. Penetration testing is a simulated cyber-attack against a point in your network to check for exploitable vulnerabilities and explore any gaps found to a significant depth, whereas vulnerability assessments look more at surface-level liabilities. Both are incredibly useful and important, but while a vulnerability scan identifies and categorizes vulnerabilities in a system, application, or network without exploiting them, pen testing involves the attempted breaching of various systems, such as application protocol interfaces (APIs), frontend servers, and backend servers.
APIs are connectors for different apps, so if one app gets breached, the hacker can piggyback onto different apps. The goal is to uncover vulnerabilities, like inputs that are susceptible to code injection attacks. Insights provided by the penetration test can be used to fine-tune your security policies and patch detected vulnerabilities.
The Process of a Pen Test
The SWK managed services team leverages a variety of resources and techniques to identify, enumerate, and exploit targeted systems. This entire process includes several key components. First, user profiling involves gathering information about the target organization and its employees from public resources like social media, and creating a list of potential usernames and email addresses for possible use in password attacks. Next, reputational threats are identified, such as misspelled or inflammatory domain names registered by attackers. Soon after, Intelligence gathering involves collecting information about the target’s environments to map out potential target IP ranges and sensitive information, using resources such as DNS records, search engines, forums, Pastebin, GitHub, and the organization’s website. Then, a vulnerability analysis identifies vulnerabilities through automated testing and scanning, validating them using multiple techniques, gathering proof for reporting, and marking false-positives to ensure relevance. During the exploitation phase, consultants attempt to exploit identified security vulnerabilities, which may result in gaining limited or full access to the target. Finally, post-exploitation activities demonstrate potential malicious impact, including privilege escalation to gain further access within the environment.
Moving Forward
After the penetration test is complete, the team will interpret their findings and compile a detailed report outlining the vulnerabilities discovered, how they were exploited, and the potential impact. Your organization will work closely with our team and develop a remediation plan to address the identified vulnerabilities, allowing you to move forward knowing your business is safer than before running the penetration tests.
Contact SWK Today
SWK understands that in the constant fight against hackers with malicious intent, knowledge is often your best asset. A penetration test provides invaluable information on the state of your network security. Contact SWK today and schedule your very own penetration test – it might be the difference between a breached network and business as usual.