Vulnerability Assessment
&
Penetration Testing
Comprehensive application & Network security audits to identify vulnerabilities and their impact across various components with SAST and DAST capabilities.
Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing
A vulnerability assessment is a testing procedure for identifying and classifying as many security flaws as feasible within a certain timeframe.
This procedure may include both automatic and manual procedures, with varying degrees of rigor and a focus on complete coverage.
Vulnerability assessments may target different layers of technology using a risk-based methodology, with the most popular being host-, network-, and application-layer evaluations.
Penetration testing frequently replicates a wide range of threats that could pose a threat to your company.
A pen test might look at whether a system can withstand attacks from both authenticated and unauthenticated users, as well as a variety of system roles.
A pen test, with the correct scope, can delve into any part of a system that you need to know about.
How It Works
A vulnerability can be defined in two ways:
A bug in code or a flaw in software design can be exploited to cause harm. Exploitation may occur via an authenticated or unauthenticated attacker.
A gap in security procedures or weakness in internal controls that when exploited results in a security breach.
A vulnerability assessment has three basic purposes.
- Detect problems ranging from serious design defects to minor configuration errors.
- Developers will be able to readily detect and reproduce the vulnerabilities if they are documented.
- Create guidelines to aid developers in addressing the discovered flaws.
Vulnerability testing can be done in a variety of ways.
Dynamic Application Security Testing is one way (DAST).
DAST is a dynamic analysis testing technique that involves executing an application (most typically a Web application) in order to uncover security issues in real-time by supplying inputs or other failure conditions.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST), on the other hand, is the study of an application’s source code or object code without executing it in order to find vulnerabilities.
The two techniques take quite distinct approaches to applications.
They are most successful at finding different sorts of vulnerabilities at different stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC).
SAST, for example, discovers key vulnerabilities early in the SDLC, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection.
DAST, on the other hand, employs an outside-in penetration testing strategy to detect security flaws in live Web applications.
Penetration testing, which is a type of vulnerability assessment in and of itself, comprises goal-oriented security testing.
Emphasizing an adversarial approach (simulating an attacker’s methods), penetration testing pursues one or more specific objectives (e.g., capture the flag).
Benefits of penetration testing
In an ideal world, your company’s software and systems were created with the goal of preventing dangerous security problems from the outset. A pen test can tell you how successful you’ve accomplished your goal.
Pen testing helps with, among other things, the following security activities:
- Identifying flaws in systems
- determining the control’s resilience
- Assisting with the observance of data privacy and security regulations (e.g., PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR)
- Providing management with both qualitative and quantitative evidence of the existing security posture and budget priorities
Pen testers aim to simulate attacks carried out by motivated adversaries. They usually accomplish it by following a plan that involves the following steps:
Reconnaissance
To guide the attack approach, gather as much information on the target as possible from public and private sources.
Internet searches, domain registration information retrieval, social engineering, nonintrusive network scanning, and even trash diving are all possible sources.
The pen tester can use this information to map out the target’s attack surface and potential vulnerabilities.
Reconnaissance varies depending on the scope and aims of the pen test and might be as easy as a phone call to walk through the system’s capabilities.
Scanning
Pen testers utilize software to look for flaws in a website or system, such as open services, application security concerns, and open source vulnerabilities.
Pen testers employ a range of tools depending on the information gathered during reconnaissance and the test.
Getting into the system
The goals of attackers range from stealing, altering, or destroying data to transferring dollars or simply hurting your reputation.
Pen testers must decide on the appropriate tools and strategies to acquire access to your system, whether through a flaw like SQL injection, malware, social engineering, or something else, in order to complete each test case.
Keeping access open
Once pen testers have gained access to the target, they must keep their simulated attack linked long enough to complete their objectives: data exfiltration, data modification, or functionality abuse.
It’s all about proving the impact that could be had.