Penetration Testing

The following components are included in this phase:

• User Profiling – By leveraging publicly available resources, such as social media and other sites, the platform attempts to gather as much information about the targeted organization, including its employees. Using such information, the platform will create a custom list of potential usernames and email addresses that may be useful for other attacks, such as password attacks.
• Reputational Threats – The platform attempts to identify potential areas that could be used to harm the target organization’s reputation. Such information could include misspelled domain names (registered by an attacker), inflammatory domain names, etc.
• Intelligence Gathering – Information about the target environment(s) will be gathered to help map out potential target IP ranges, environments that may contain sensitive information, as well as other information that may be valuable to an attacker. Publicly available resources searched during this phase include current and historic DNS records, search engines, forums, Pastebin, GitHub, and the organization’s website.
• Vulnerability Analysis – Vulnerabilities are identified through both manual testing as well as automated testing and scanning. As vulnerabilities are identified within the targeted environment, the platform will validate the existence of the vulnerability by attempting to leverage multiple validation techniques (e.g. Nmap, Metasploit, etc.). Once validated, the platform will gather proof of validation for reporting purposes. During this phase, the platform also marks false positives as such to assist the organization with only relevant and validated security vulnerabilities.
• Exploitation – Based on the security vulnerabilities identified in the Vulnerability Analysis phase, the platform will cautiously attempt to perform exploitation of security vulnerabilities. Depending on the type of security vulnerability exploited, this process may result in the platform gaining limited, or full, access to the exploited target.
• Post-Exploitation – To demonstrate the full impact that a malicious attacker could potentially make within the organization, the platform will attempt to perform post-exploitation within the environment. One of the activities involved in this process is privilege escalation, which is the attempt to escalate access within the environment to privileges that would allow for further access within the environment. 

Vulnerability Scanning

The vulnerability scanning process consists of an automated vulnerability scanner testing the organization’s network environment for security threats that are present and immediately visible from a network perspective. A vulnerability scan does not attempt to simulate the actions of a malicious attacker (e.g. penetration test) and only identifies security weaknesses that are directly visible. The following components are included as part of a vulnerability assessment.

• Vulnerability Analysis – Vulnerabilities are identified through automated testing and scanning. The vulnerability scan process will identify security weaknesses that are present on the surface of the external network environment. The vulnerabilities identified could pertain to many potential security weaknesses, including, but not limited to authentication, patching, and configuration weaknesses, as well as issues that could lead to unauthorized access of sensitive data and/or systems.