Penetration Test is a security testing method that involves performing a planned cyber-attack with an ethical hacker on your systems. This would typically mean performing a planned attack under controlled conditions, replicating scenarios of a real attack attempt. The test is performed to identify exploitable vulnerabilities and evaluate the effectiveness of your organization’s security posture. The Penetration test involves identifying vulnerabilities, determining how an attacker would escalate access to sensitive information, determining potential impacts, and identifying susceptible applications and systems that may expose your business to cyber risks. The information or findings obtained from the test can help fine-tune your system or application security policies and patch detected vulnerabilities.
We sit with your team to discuss, analyze, and define the objectives of Penetration Testing.
In collaboration with your team, we gather information relevant to assessment goals before planning a staged attack.
At this stage, we identify the possible vulnerabilities on the target network.
Once the potential vulnerabilities are identified, we run a Pen Test to verify the same through an active intrusion attempt.
Once we gain access to a system, we inject agents to see if we can successfully maintain access to the system for a long period of time, irrespective of reboots, reset, or modified by the network administrator.
We conduct a complete analysis of vulnerabilities that were identified, exploited, and sensitive data that were accessed. We further analyze the amount of time we maintained access in the system and for the tenure it was undetected.
The results of the Penetration Test are compiled into a report detailing a summary of the Penetration Testing, Vulnerabilities, Risks detected, Recommendations for bridging the GAP, and Suggestions for better security.
Once vulnerabilities are identified and remediated, we run a re-test on the system to ensure that fixes were successfully implemented and determine any new vulnerabilities that could be detected due to remediation.
Any organization looking to strengthen the security of their IT infrastructure and identify vulnerabilities that could possibly lead to security threats may need to run a Penetration Test on their systems.
Vulnerability Assessment is a method of scanning and identifying vulnerabilities in systems. While Penetration testing is a technique of simulating a real attack on the system and exploit weaknesses in the environment, quantify the amount of damage a breach can inflict and possible data compromise.
There are two types of Penetration Testing:
External: This testing engages over the public IP address space. The server is accessible from the Internet and publically available to any user to access the server. The test simulates a real attack and determines how an attacker would attempt a breach from the Internet.
Internal: This testing engages from inside the organization’s private network. The test simulates a real attack and determines how an attacker would attempt access to the organization network or a disgruntled employee having insider knowledge and working of the system.
Penetration Testing should be performed at least once a year or subject to the Compliance requirements such as that of PCI DSS. This is to ensure security management of IT Infrastructure against evolving threats and cyber-attacks.