Table Of Contents
1. What is penetration testing?
2. What makes authorized penetration testing different from malicious hacking?
3. Opportunities in Penetration testing
4. Why Choose RedTeam Academy for Certified Penetration Tester Course?
What is penetration testing?
Penetration testing aka pen test is a mechanism performing an authorized and simulated cyber-attack on computer systems, networks, and/or applications to evaluate the security of the systems.
This technique is used by companies of various sizes and revenue to pro-actively identify security flaws or weaknesses in the systems, that can be potentially exploited by threat actors or malicious sources such as hackers.
What makes authorized penetration testing different from malicious hacking?
Systems are hacked with malicious intent such as exploitations, espionage, information extrusion, or sabotage.
These disrupt and harm the company, its reputation, services, and systems. This can even result in companies shutting down due to unpredictable losses.
Although the techniques and tactics used in the pen test are identical to how the hackers would do. However, an authorized penetration tester will have pre-approval to proceed with the engagement.
The scope and objectives of the professional engagements are defined with business and technology stakeholders and are mostly executed in a non-intrusive mode
The pen testers also use social engineering tactics to trick humans to fall victim to cyber-attack and divulge disclosing sensitive corporate information or access to networks and systems.
Any chain is as good as its weakest link, and most humans are so in cybersecurity.
A professional social engineering engagement will help in identifying gaps and raising awareness among employees of the organization.
To learn more about penetration testing let us divide its process into 5 steps
Reconnaissance and OSINT
During this process, various passive and active techniques are used to gather information about the target.
The penetration tester gathers such information from the public domain, using certain tactical skills, cyber footprint analysis, etc.
Actionable intelligence gathered is then used to get to the next stage called scanning.
Scanning
Based on the intelligence gathered and knowledge developed about the target, the penetration tester then gets into creating a blueprint of the systems, and networks of the target.
Automated and manual techniques are used to fingerprint the network, systems, and also to evaluate the default response of the target system to certain attack vectors.
This gives hackers a fair understanding of underlying system design and architecture.
Gaining access
Results of previous phases will enable the penetration tester to assess the potential systems and their vulnerabilities. To evaluate and exploit the identified vulnerabilities a simulation attack is performed.
Manual and automated techniques and solutions are used in this phase such as ZAPProxy, Burpsuite, Metasploit, sqlMap, etc. to name a few.
During these phases the penetration tester would have gained access to corporate systems or network or information, using the same tactics deployed by a malicious attacker.
Maintaining access
Post a successful breach into a system or network, it is important to keep away from stay under the radars and ensure the access is maintained to simulate further lateral and vertical movements within the compromised system and/or network.
This will also help in understanding the efficiency of deployed security monitoring solutions within a corporate network.