Ultimate Guide to What is Penetration Testing

With the growing technological trend, almost every field has become heavily dependent on the digital world. Everything is now handled online, from simple daily payments to saving personal information. However, no one is guaranteed from sensitive info drain. Many hackers are ready to find a crack in the system's security to steal someone's data.

Individuals and big organizations are not immune to potential security risks. Thus, cybersecurity has become a prime necessity for everyone. To create a secure digital environment, tactics and services such as penetration testing have appeared.

Penetration testing (aka pen testing) is a simulated attack on a computer system to evaluate its security. Its goal is to find the system's security weaknesses and prevent unauthorized parties from gaining access to critical data.

Penetration testing is among the top-notch methodologies Hexens is ready to apply to address and serve your security needs. The results gained after penetration testing can be used to reveal security vulnerabilities, assess potential risks, and enhance the system's security.

Stages of Pen Testing

The pen testing process can be divided into the following stages:

• Planning — Before starting the cyberattack, testers and the company need to be sure about the purpose of the testing. The clients and the testers need to clearly know what tests will be conducted, who will know about this, and how much information is vulnerable during the testing. Once the primary goal of testing is revealed, testers pass on finding out which tools are needed.
• Scanning — This stage helps the testers understand the system's intricacies and come up with a plan to hack it. Information like IP addresses, personal data, and email addresses can be of great value.
• Gaining Access — This stage is for the testers to start implementing different attacks, such as cross-site scripting, backdoors, and SQL injection, to find the drawbacks of the security system. After gaining access, the testers start finding vulnerabilities in the system to gain information of any kind.
• Maintaining Access — The testers exploit the system data to determine how long the attacker can stay in the system without being detected.
• Analyzing — The last and the most important stage. Through analyzing the gained info, the company’s cybersecurity service team can understand the blind spots missed by the system developers. With all these well-documented issues, they can patch up all the vulnerabilities to level up the security.

After the testing, the ethical hacker leaves the system, trying to bring it to the initial state.

Different Methods of Pen Testing

Given the growing necessity of pen testing, the testers came up with different strategies for testing:

• External — This method targets the organization’s visible assets to the public. It includes the info accessible to everyone via the internet and is highly vulnerable. Examples of such assets are the company website itself, web applications, and even email.
• Internal — As the name implies, the testing is carried out from within the company. Its goal is to discover what would happen if a cybercriminal could penetrate the system.
• Blind — In this scenario, a tester acts like a real attacker. The team won’t have any insider information about the company. Instead, they need to use what they can find from publicly available domains and use that info to hack the system.
• Double Blind — This testing may seem more frightening and realistic, as the IT personnel and the workers don’t know about the attack — they are ‘blind’. This helps to check and assess the company's readiness in case of a real cyberattack.
• Targeted — In this case, both the company’s IT team and external professionals work together to get real feedback from the simulated hack. Testers use open networks to conduct targeted pen testing to compare the findings and seek optimal solutions.

While pen testing is just one of the methods to reveal and identify potential risks, it holds a solid place among effective methodologies you can include in your cybersecurity-enhancing strategy.