Why do Penetration Testing?

Assess real-world cyber readiness

Uncover complex vulnerabilities, business logic flaws, and weaknesses in processes or employee training

Find compliance violations and satisfy pen testing requirements from PCI-DSS and other regulations

Document security gaps in technology and processes for auditor and
executive review

Prioritize remediation based on exploitability of issues discovered in your environment

How are Penetration Tests performed?

Our goal is to emulate the methodologies used by today’s cyber criminals — you must think like your adversaries in order to beat them.

1. Scoping

Goals are set for the breadth of weaknesses that pen testers will probe for and systems or processes they’re meant to target. Rules of engagement are set for the test methods and pen test frameworks that can be used, as well as where in the network or physical premises testers can operate.

2. Recon and scanning

Particularly important in black box testing, the reconnaissance phase has pen testers gathering intelligence about the network and systems through a range of methods, including network scans, social engineering, reverse engineering, and static or dynamic analysis of application code. Testers seek to map out as much information as possible to look for vulnerabilities they can exploit.

3. Gaining access

Once pen testers enumerate the network and system vulnerabilities, they begin the work of exploiting flaws to gain access to systems. Like attackers commonly do, they’ll frequently seek to gain footholds on low-value assets, move laterally across the network, and escalate privileges on systems wherever possible.

4. Maintaining access and evading detection

Depending on the scope of engagement, pen testers tasked with mimicking advanced attackers may be called upon to seek persistence on systems they exploit and hide evidence of their network incursion to test how long (or if) the security team finds their simulated ‘malicious’ behavior.

5. Reporting and analysis

The best penetration tests are followed up with detailed reporting that offers analysis of which vulnerabilities or security weaknesses pen testers exploited to gain access, what sensitive information they were able to access, how long they were able to evade detection, and what that means for the organization moving forward. Pen testers should ideally offer guidance and prioritization on how a company should go about closing security gaps they’ve found, both through changes in technology and processes.

Common Questions

At Interactive Security, all projects including Penetration Testing, are done in-house by USA based ethical hackers.  We use enterprise grade tools that meet the strictest standards (i.e., PCI compliance).

No. We carefully scope each Penetration Test project with our client well in advance of kick-off.  We customize each project to ensure the client’s needs are met.  Our team fully understands what systems are being tested, how deep the testing should go, and when appropriate testing windows are.  We account for any third-party requirements that are involved such as CMMC compliance, HIPAA compliance, SOC2 compliance, and PCI-DSS compliance.  Unless requested by the client, our Penetration Testing is not designed to disrupt client operations in any way.

Penetration Tests can be performed on many systems such as external & internal networks, wireless networks, applications, web applications, IoT and mobile applications.

Penetration testers typically use vulnerability scanning tools as a part of their pen testing tactics, but the practice of penetration testing is very different than vulnerability scanning. Automated vulnerability scanning creates a laundry list of vulnerabilities and configuration flaws in systems or applications under review. Meanwhile, manual penetration testing examines a target environment as a whole looking into complex or underlying weaknesses that a vulnerability scanner may not find, including business logic flaws, poor separation of duties, ineffective network segmentation, and more.

Ideally, every day.  (Just kidding….sort of).  Penetration testing is an extremely critical component of any cybersecurity program that dramatically helps an organization protect itself.  And since systems are always changing and criminals are always improving, frequent testing is important.  However realistically, best practice is to perform an annual penetration test at a minimum.   And because it’s so critical to maintain a security routine, we include quarterly vulnerability scans as part of our penetration testing projects.