Penetration Testing Process, Testing Types and Attack Types

If you are a business that serves multiple clients, store confidential data and especially when you are growing by expanding to new office locations, implementing new systems, applications or upgrading IT infrastructure, there are potential security vulnerabilities that you need to be mindful of.

Penetration testing or Pen Test identifies security vulnerabilities to safeguard websites, apps, network settings, or systems from external attacks to access confidential information. Penetration testing mitigates such risks by identifying loopholes and enables stakeholders to take corrective actions.

Penetration testing is typically a manual or automated, authorized simulated attack on a computer system to determine security weaknesses. Penetration testing tools such as Metasploit, Wireshark, W3af, Core Impact, and Nessus exploit weak spots in packet data, network protocols, decryption, password identification and cracking, device/network penetration, SQL injection and collect data to analyze security of the system. The penetration not only reveals an organization’s security compliances but also exposes the employee’s security awareness and their collective ability to respond to such incidents.

Penetration Testing Process

The process of Penetration Testing is completed in 5 steps or stages.

1. It starts with a planning process where test scope, test objectives are well defined in line with the prioritized business goals. It is important to decide at this stage whether the internal employees are informed about the test or not. Necessary approvals, access controls are obtained before any tests are executed.
2. The next step is to identify relevant tools to expose vulnerabilities in the given environment. Before that existing technical environment is extensively studied. Test types are determined, information gathering mechanisms are established.
3. The actual phase where Penetration tests are executed. Using the tools and techniques as identified in the earlier steps, tests are executed to understand vulnerabilities and response behavior captured from the target subjects.
4. With the access the testers are able to gain in a secured system, advanced techniques and analysis are done to measure the magnitude of the damages that could be caused by each vulnerability. Detailed reports are prepared to identify prioritized remedies that are necessary to fix vulnerabilities.
5. Remedy of high-priority vulnerabilities are escalated to respective stakeholders and fixes are implemented. Assessments of the overall health, a routine of the successive penetration testing, recommendations, etc. are prepared and submitted to the stakeholders.

Penetration Testing Types

1. External Testing

   External testing refers to attacks on the organization’s perimeter either from the internet or extranet and it targets a company’s external servers or devices such as domain name servers (DNS), email servers, web servers or firewalls settings. The objective is to find if attackers can intrude an organization’s network and how far they can go after gaining access.

2. Internal Testing

   Internal testing is performed within an organization’s network behind the firewall by an authorized visitor having standard access privileges. The focus is to understand what an internal user would do to penetrate specific organizational resources that are not part of one’s privilege and gain access to it.

3. Blind Testing

   In blind testing strategy, the testing team is given very limited information, mostly the name of the company and the team makes use of the publicly available information such as domain name registry, proprietary information, USENET, Internet discussion board to probe information about the target. Blind test strategy simulates the actions of a real hacker and it is time-consuming and expensive for the reason the testers take time to research on the target.

4. Double Blind Testing Strategy

   It is a step ahead of the blind test strategy. In this type of testing, only very few people are informed of the testing and the organization’s IT team is not notified about the blind test and test activities. The double-blind test is one of the important testing types as it clearly determines an organization’s security monitoring, incident identification, escalation and reporting procedures.

Now that we have known different penetration testing strategies, let us further learn about different system attack types.

• Spoofing: In a spoofing attack, the intruder attempts to gain unauthorized access to a user’s system or information impersonating the user.
• Brute Force Attack: Brute force attack is an exhaustive trial and error method attempting to gain access to legitimate authorized information. A number of alphanumeric combinations are tried to decode encrypted information such as Data Encryption Standard (DES) keys or passwords.
• Trojan Attack: Trojan horse or Trojans are malicious programs that are used to hack into a computer. These programs can be sent through email attachments or transferred via IM chat rooms. Trojans run in stealth mode in the user’s system and get installed without the user’s knowledge and release the remote-control channels to capture information.
• Network Sniffing: Sniffing is an information-gathering technique that enables capturing highly sensitive data such as passwords, bank details or conversation between two people while the data travels on the network.

With so much awareness in the Technology World, malicious users are highly informed and could easily target potentially weak organizations or repositories and publicize confidential data. Organizations and Individuals get themselves into unwanted publicity and penal actions against regulations.

Penetration Testing is often conducted by highly certified, ethical and specialized organizations to certify enterprise-level security health. Connect with us if your apps or systems need to be protected with penetration testing.