What is penetration testing, and how does it work?
Jun 13, 2021
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Are you worried about the security of your application? Do you want to know how a hacker can target your website or application? The answer to your query is Penetration Testing or Pen Testing.Penetration testing or Pen testing is the simulation of a real-world attack on your web-based application, service, solution, or system. It uses the pre-existing tools and techniques that a hacker would use to attack your system.
What is a Penetration Test?
Pen testing is an efficient method to discover the vulnerabilities present in the system or a network with existing security policies. Pen testing involves attacking the target systems similar to a malicious attacker or hacker.
Pen testing has become a crucial part of cybersecurity from the time companies; organizations realized the need for security and the loss a cyberattack can cause to their business and revenue.
Penetration testing aims to fix the vulnerabilities and security gaps present in your system before the hacker can use them against you.
The pen testing process can include attempts to breach any number of application systems to spot the vulnerabilities like unsanitized inputs, which are prone to code injection attacks or easily accessible databases.
Why do we need Pen testing?
Everyone is concerned about the security of their system or application and often researches the techniques to protect them. However, have you ever thought about why your system needs a Penetration test?
There are several reasons to perform a pen test. The most important of all is to bring to light the security gaps in the system's architecture. Also, to create awareness amongst the employees of an organization to take security concerns seriously and follow the required measures.
Penetration testing can help us identify the kind of environment a hacker would use to attack into the system and secure the logic and the data associated with the application. These malicious attacks can cause damage to your business resulting in high revenue losses. Pen testing is a medium to minimize these financial losses as it predicts the potential risks, which can then be fixed.
Penetration testing not only helps to know the vulnerabilities in the system but also aids to decide the roadmap to ensure the security of the system. It helps in policy-making and taking the necessary actions to comply with the regulations and keep your system secure from cyber attackers.
How does Pen Testing Work?
Penetration testing is a task that requires effort, experience, and time to generate reports and maintain the security of an application efficiently. The pen testers start with pen testing after appropriate planning and understanding the scope of the tests involved in the process.
The cybersecurity professionals look into the web request sent to the application and modify it abnormally to see what kind of results this modified request can fetch. These fishy requests produce results that are beyond imagination.
The result could be confidential database elements, a list of documents, technical information, crashing of services, redirecting to malicious websites, and so on.
To overcome such unwanted responses, pen testers follow a fixed approach to yield efficient and reliable results at the end of penetration testing in the following manner:
1. Planning and reconnaissance
The penetration testing process starts with understanding the target through public or private sources and gather as much information as possible. This is a process where the real hackers spend most of their time studying the target system and discover the open ends for them to attack it.
This is a phase to figure out the scope and goals of penetration testing on a particular system. If penetration testers spend enough time and utilize it well during this phase, the results fetched in the later stages are more accurate and highly reliable.
2. Scanning
This is a crucial phase of penetration testing where the experts start to work with the target system. The cybersecurity professional starts to scan your system for loopholes or security gaps present. They send requests to see how the system would respond to a particular request.
This phase of penetration testing is accomplished with the aid of various network-scanning tools, open File Transfer Protocol portals, services running on the network, and identifying available or shared drives.
The scanning process could be static or dynamic. An application vulnerability analyst manually scans the code in static scanning to identify susceptible logic and functions in an application. Whereas in dynamic scanning, the tester passes various inputs to the website or application and records its responses.
3. Gaining Access
As soon as the penetration testers complete the scanning of vulnerabilities and identify them, they try to exploit these vulnerabilities to gain access to the system, just like a hacker would do. One key point to remember is to prioritize the vulnerabilities in the order of their criticalness.
Never forget to exploit the issues that are decisive for your system. Most common vulnerabilities include gaps in a network configuration used for communication and enable the hacker to capture information while messages travel via the network.
4. Maintaining Access
Whenever a thief tries to steal from a house, once he gets into the house, the next target is to search and take all the valuables without getting caught. Similarly, hackers also aim to gain and maintain access to your system persistently without getting caught.
These hackers want to access the system even if it is rebooted, reset, or modified. Often, these attackers have a plan to overcome the basic strategies to detect such intrusions. The testers simulate how the system would respond once the malware attacks it.
This is a critical phase by which the penetration testers have gained ample knowledge about the system and monitor it from inside to determine the appropriate timing of the attack. This helps you to analyze how long a hacker can survive in your system and how you can take action before anything happens to you.
5. Exploitation
Once the pen tester successfully gains access to the target system or application, it means that they have determined all the vulnerable entry points for attackers. This phase of penetration testing aims to get secret or confidential information without being caught or detected by the security system. The pen tester goes as far as the scope of the agreement to avoid leaking the organization's sensitive information.
Wrapping Up
Application security is still a concern for most of the organizations that exist today. Lack of knowledge and awareness leads to data and security breaches in organizations on both small and large scales. Penetration testing is an essential step towards building a secure environment for the web application of a company.
The technicalities involved in securing the systems or the process involved for penetration testing might be beyond the understanding of non-technical teams. But, connecting with the experts to analyze the situation and implement the required remedies is a must for all.
Astra Security is a service provider that gives reliable and highly efficient cybersecurity services to companies at minimum prices to safeguard your business. Let the experts do their job so that you can relax without worries.
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