Every day starts with a new headline when it is about the latest cybersecurity attack. At an alarming frequency, the hackers continue to steal billions of dollars and millions of records. Therefore, the key to combating these efforts is conduct through pen testing throughout the year.
What is pen testing?
Pentesting is specially designed to assess your security before the attacker. Many pen-testing tools simulate real-world attack scenarios to discover and exploit any security gaps that may lead to compromised credentials, stolen records, personally identifiable information, intellectual property, and other harmful business outcomes.
When you can exploit the security vulnerabilities, pen testing can help you determine how you can best mitigate and protect your best vital business data for any types of future cybersecurity attacks.
Stages of pen testing
Five main stages must be completed with any typical pentest.
- Information gathering
Before a pen testing team takes any action, one must complete suitable information gathering on the perspective target. This period is critical to establish an attack plan and can be a staging ground for the engagement's entirety.
- Scanning
In the next step, a collection of scans is performed on the target to decipher how the security systems can counter multiple breach attempts. Discovering open ports, vulnerabilities, and other weak areas within the network infrastructure can dictate how pen testers continue with the planned attack.
- Gaining access
After collecting the data, pen testers leverage the common web attacks to exploit any present vulnerabilities. After obtaining access, the testers attempt to imitate the scope of the potential damage that the malicious attack can generate.
- Maintaining access
The main goal of this particular stage is to achieve a constant presence state within the target environment. With the passage of time, more data is collected throughout the exploited system, allowing the testers to mimic any advanced persistent threats.
- Covering tracks
After completing the engagement, any trace of attack must be eliminated to ensure anonymity. Scripts, log events, and other executables that the target can discover should be untraceable. A comprehensive report of the in-depth analysis of the whole engagement will be shared with the target to highlight the critical vulnerabilities.
How is pen testing performed?
You can do it in-house with your experts with the help of the pen-testing tools, or you may outsource to a pen testing service provider. The pen testing process starts with the security professional who enumerates the target network to find vulnerable accounts or systems.
Each system on the network is scanned for open ports that have different services running on them. It is quite rare to see if the entire network has every service configured correctly, password-protected properly, and fully patched. After fully understanding the network and vulnerabilities, the pentester will use the tool to exploit the vulnerability to gain unwelcome access.
Bottom Line
A pentest is a crucial component of network security because, with thorough pen testing, security professionals can find and test the safety of the web services, multi-tier network architectures, custom applications, and other components of IT. These pen testing services and tools are helpful to gain fast insight into the high-risk areas so that you can effectively plan your projects and budgets. Thorough testing is needed to secure vital data from cybersecurity hackers and improve the response time in an attack.