The best way to anticipate attacks on your IT systems is to mimic the methods of attackers to find vulnerabilities before they do and help you fix them. Penetration testing entails assessing the effectiveness of your security controls to:
Ensure regulatory compliance of industry standard bodies such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) by improving security posture
Like any IT project, penetration testing needs great planning capabilities. Pentesting is not a set of technical steps but requires many management and organizational skills. An effective pentesting would start with a meeting with the client to have a crystal understanding of all their needs and vision. As a result of the meeting, It will describe in detail how the pentest will be conducted. Many important items need to be taken care of during the pre-engagement phase including:
During this phase, Intellisec Solutions collects all publicly available information on your corporation with the help of numerous OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) tools and techniques. This data is used to assess the current state of affairs and acts as a foundation for accurate risk assessment at later stages of our engagement. Intelligence on the following assets is typically gathering: External IP addresses, domains, data leaks, misconfigurations, Internet of things (IoT) systems.
Threat modeling is a security approach to identify threats against the infrastructure of an organization. Modeling and quantifying are always wise decisions in information security, and especially in penetration testing. Measuring threats in a realistic way will help penetration testers make good decisions later. The aim of this structured approach is the identification and ranking of threats and assets, using a method that aligns with the business needs of the organization, and then mapping them.
Vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying, measuring, and classifying vulnerabilities in an information system.
During this phase, the penetration tester wears a black hat and tries to gain access to the infrastructure from a malicious hacker’s perspective. Mostly will be used during the exploitation phase.
Getting root privileges is not the end of the road. As discussed before, maintaining access is an essential phase in hacking methodologies, thus post-exploitation is required to not only maintain access but to spread into the infrastructure, to further compromise the system.
Reporting and documentation are critical aspects of any penetration testing because only well-organized testing can help the management in making data-driven decisions. In this regard, each report is customized to the specific scope of the assessment and risk as per your organization. Reports are comprehensive, with due technical details, but intuitive to read. Remediation strategy for each vulnerability is provided as well. Some of the elements of the reports are: