CEH v10 Penetration Testing

Ethical Hacking and penetration testing are common terms, popular in information security environment for a long time. Increase in cybercrimes and hacking create a great challenge for security experts and analyst and regulations over the last decade. It is a popular war between hackers and security professionals. CEH v10 Ethical Hacking Concepts and scope

Fundamental challenges to these security experts are of finding weakness and deficiencies in running and upcoming systems, applications, software and addressing them proactively/. It is less costly to investigate proactively before an attack instead of investigating after falling into an attack, or while dealing with an atttack. For security aspect, prevention and protection, organizations have their penetration testing teams internally as well contracted outside professional experts when and if they are needed depending on the severity and scope of the attack.

Penetration Testing

In the ethical hacking environment, the most common term that often ises is pentester. Pentesters are the penetration tester that has permission to hack a system by owner. Penetration testing is the process of a hacking a system with the permission from the owner of that system, to evaluate security, Hack value, Target of evaluation (TOE), attakcs, exploit, zero-day vulnerability & other compoenents such as threats, vulnerabilities, and daisy chaining.CEH v10 Penetration Testing




Why Penetration Testing

1) Identify the threats facing an organization's information assets.

2) Reduce an organization's expenditure on IT security and enhance Return On

Security Investment (ROSI) by identifying and remediating vulnerabilities or weaknesses.

3) Provide assurance with comprehensive assessment of organization's security including policy, procedure, design, and implementation.

4) Gain and maintain certification to an industry regulation (BS7799, HIPAA etc.).

5) Adopt best practices in compliance to legal and industry regulations.

6) For testing and validating the efficiency of security protections and controls.

7) For changing or upgrading existing infrastructure of software, hardware, or 

network design.CEH v10 Course Outline

8) Focus on high-severity vulnerabilities and emphasize application-level security issues to development teams and management.
9) Provide a comprehensive approach of preparation steps that can be taken to prevent upcoming exploitation.

10) Evaluate the efficiency of network security devices such as firewalls, routers, and web servers.

 

Comparing Security Audit, Vulnerability Assessment, and Penetration Testing

1) Security Audit: A security audit just checks whether the organization is following set of standard security policies and procedures. CEH v10 Tutorial
    
2) Vulnerability Assessment: A vulnerability assessment focues on discovering the vulnerabilities in the information system but provides no indication if the vulnerabilities can be exploited or the amount of damage that may result from the successful exploitabion of the vulnerability.

3) Penetration Testing: Penetration testing is methodological approach to security assessment that encompasses the security audit and vulnerability assessment and demonstrates if the vulnerabilities in system can be successfully exploited by attackers.CEH v10 Penetration Testing

Blue Teaming/Red Teaming

Blue Teaming

1) An approach where a set of security responders performs analysis of an information system to assess the adequacy and efficiency of its security controls.CEH v10 Penetration Testing
    
2) Blue team has access to all the organizational resources and information.
   
3) Primary role is to detect and mitigate red team (attackers) activities, and to anticipate how surprise attacks might occur.

Red Teaming 
    
1) An approach where a team of ethical hackers performs penetration test on an information system with no or a very limited access to the organization's internal resources.
    
2) It may be conducted with or without warning.
    
3) It is proposed to detect network and system vulnerabilities and check security from an attacker's perspective approach to network, system, or information access. CEH v10 Penetration Testing

Types of Penetration Testing

1) Black-box: No prior knowledge of the infrastructure to be tested:
       *)  Blind Testing 
       *) Double Blind Testing 

2)White-box: Complete knowledge of the infrastructure that needs to be tested.

3)Grey-box: Limited knowledge of the infrastructure that needs to be tested.


There are two ways to perform above penetration tests:
    
*) Announced Testing    
*) Unannounced Testing:  
*) Monitor
*) Response
*) Escalation

Phases of Penetration Testing

Pre-Attack Phase:    

1) Planning and preparation
     *) Methodology designing => (Rule of Engagement)/RoB (Rule  of Behavior)
     *) Network information gathering


2) Attack Phase:
     *) Penetrating perimeter
     *) Acquiring target
     *) Escalating privileges
     *) Execution, implantation, retracting


3) Post-Attack Phase:
     *) Reporting
     *) Clean-up
     *) Artifact destruction

Security Testing Methodology

There are some methodology approaches to be adopted for security or  CEH v10 Penetration Testing  penetration testing, industry-leading pemetration testing methodologies are :-



1) Open web application security project ( OWASP )
2) Open source security testing methdology manual ( OSSTMM )
3) Information systems security assessment framework ( ISAF )
4) EC-Councli licensed penetration tester ( LPT ) methdology





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