What is pentest and how to effectively use it?

What is pen test service? What is penetration test?

The purpose of penetration testing is to define the security level of the system where we would identify threats and vulnerabilities that enable potential adversary unauthorized actions that have an impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Traditionally penetration testing struggles to match the development speed of modern software applications. Applications are rapidly evolving and attack surfaces are getting bigger, therefore it’s no longer reasonable to perform penetration tests annually or wait two months to begin a test. Here’s why we started to talk about “Next generation penetration testing”:

• It brings a new way of continually managing cyber risks compared to traditional penetration testing. The next-generation penetration test consists of individual services packaged to provide a cost-effective proactive service.
• Expand protection and fill the gaps between penetration tests.
• Agile validation of the mitigation and remediation of previously discovered vulnerabilities and new features. Save time by optimizing and limiting the amount of interaction needed with the client to the minimum.

Penetration tests must be performed only by trusted and verified experts to ensure:

• The system stability of your systems.
• Prevent any data corruption and exposure.
• Ensure methodological security risk assessment.

Security risk assessments should recognize, quantify, and prioritize information security risks against defined criteria for risk acceptance and objectives relevant to the company. The results should guide and determine the appropriate management measures and priorities for managing information security risks and for implementing controls selected to protect against these risks.

Assessing risks and selecting controls may need to be performed repeatedly across different parts of the information system, and to respond to changes. As part of penetration testing you will get:

• Executive summary with strategic recommendations for long-term improvements
• Technical details with a mitigation plan for immediate improvements
• Attack recreate details
• Remeditation assistance

Why do we need penetration testing?

Penetration testing analyzes the real-world strength of your existing security controls when a skilled penetration tester actively tries to hack into your system. While automated penetration testing can only identify some most common cybersecurity issues, true penetration testing considers your company's vulnerability to manual attacks too.

In reality, hackers aren't going to stop their attacks just because the standard automated test doesn’t discover any vulnerability. Well organized automated and manual testing can:

• determine infrastructure, software, physical, and even personnel weaknesses
• help your business develop stronger controls.

For the same reason you go to a medical doctor for an annual health check, it makes sense to turn to highly trained security consultants to go through your security testing/pentest. While you might believe you are perfectly healthy, a doctor can run several different tests to detect dangers you may not even be aware of yet.

Similarly, the people who are responsible for your company's security and for maintaining and monitoring your infrastructure daily may not have the objectivity needed to identify security weaknesses, understand the level of risk for your organization, and help address and fix critical issues. To put it another way, in this ongoing game of cat and mouse, it helps to bring in a new cat.

To put it another way, in this ongoing game of cat and mouse, it helps to bring in a new cat.

What are benefits of penetration testing?

• Know whether your company is safe
• Mitigate threats before attackers exploit them
• Solwall team behaves like real hacker
• Manual approach could not be repeated with automated testing tools

What are the types of penetration testing?

Range of offensive cybersecurity services
Service	Objective	Benefit
External pentest	Identify and evaluate security vulnerabilities of company's infrastructure and recommend risk mitigation strategies	Understand Internet footprint and associated risks to your environment
Internal pentest	Simulate an attack from an internal network to access end-user systems, including escalation of privileges and access to critical data	Understand how good your internal security is and what might be a risk to your business from a breach
Red teaming	Simulate behavior of a real hacker and try to compromise your environment from the internet	Test attack detection and response capabilities of your security team - without real risk
Mobile application pentest	Recognize and define security threats that can lead to data exposure or unauthorized access	Understand and improve security of your mobile application
Web application pentest	Recognize and define security threats that can lead to data exposure or unauthorized access	Understand and improve security of your web application
Configuration audit	Compare system configuration against best practices defined by global community of security experts	Improving your security by tightening of the operating system rules and software version checks
Social engineering	Determine the credibility and loyalty of the employees towards the company and its security policies	Prepare company and employees against social engineering attacks
Source code review	Examine an application source code to find errors overlooked in initial phase of development	Identifying vulnerabilities at the root level

What are penetration testing methodologies?

There are numerous penetration testing methodologies, where OWASP and OSSTM are the most used when performing penetration tests. Other methodologies usually cover the same principles but are different in some specifics. We can cover regulatory security assessment requirements for:

• OWASP
• PSD2
• NIS directive
• PCI-DSS
• SOC2 Type II
• HITRUST
• and other compliance certifications.

Usage of proven methodologies also gives consistent results and rule out the possibility of a false sense of security.

Penetration testing approach

Different methodologies are used while performing a penetration test to ensure consistent results. We perform comprehensive testing according to OWASP or relevant methodology during the security assessment.

System security architecture overview, components and application process itself are checked in the information-gathering phase. Detecting application and information system misconfigurations with vulnerabilities of publicly available services would be conducted in the next phase of the penetration test.

As we are using the same techniques and tools as hackers do while providing a penetration test, we actually try to exploit previously detected vulnerabilities. Reporting and recommendations are provided aligning with the technology best fitting your applications, performance criteria, budget, or existing infrastructure.

Well, penetration test stops at exploitation phase and does not install malware or access nor modify the data on client systems as real attackers would.

Penetration testing phases

• Information gathering - Understand the system before real attacks are planed
• Vulnerability identification - Discover the vulnerabilities within the target environment.
• Vulnreability exploitation - Gain access by exploiting identified vulnerabilites with internally developed tools.
• Mission accomplished - Report detailed findings with a mitigation plan and try to move further.

Does penetration testing involve programming?

Of course, penetration tester must have development knowledge to provide good service. It is essential for the manual testing part as tools usually need modifications, the application's inner working is better understandable and debugging is not possible without knowledge also.

The manual approach is the main difference between penetration testing and vulnerability scanning, where the majority of work is done automatically and almost everyone could do it. An experienced penetration tester is using automatic vulnerability scanning only in the initial phase.

How much does penetration testing cost

This depends on the scope, in the average cost of a penetration test starts from 2000€. When executed properly, it’s worth every cent. Mainly, because you are getting a specialist or a team of specialists who will work on finding any possible way your system can be affected. Later, you receive a detailed report with recommendations regarding the discovered threats and, when necessary, continuous system support.

Another element that affects penetration testing costs is the frequency in which you perform it. Like many other assessments, penetration tests are necessary on a regular basis, to ensure you comply with all the standards and no new issues emerge. Depending on the complexity of your infrastructure and the frequency of updates, the recommended testing regularity is once or twice per year.

History of penetration testing

By the mid 1960s, the popularity of online time-sharing computers created new concerns about security. It was shown that an employee could easily bypass all of the safeguards of the system. By the end of the decade, the security of computers became a major issue and the United States Department of Defense issued a major report on the issue.

Then the United States Department of Defense turned to American computer pioneer Willis Ware to form a task force comprised of experts from NSA, CIA, DoD, academia, and industry to assess the security risks of computer penetration.

By the '70s the first penetration testing teams so-called "Tiger teams" emerged on the security scene. These teams utilized penetration testing techniques as a means for testing the security of the computer systems. Through the efforts of these teams at the RAND Corporation, it was revealed the usefulness of penetration testing as a tool for assessing the security of computer systems.

In the next decades as computers come into being the backbone of the world and as the internet importance arose, the use of penetration testing as a tool for security assessment and auditing became much more refined and expanded. This day penetration testing has become an essential part of assessing a business's security and ability to withstand eventual attacks from hackers.

As time progresses on security auditing and penetration testing will only become more important as hackers become more sophisticated and are able to find new backdoors and access points into business networks and physical locations.