Pen Testing 101: Methods, Areas, and Types

Last updated on October 15th, 2022 at 07:18 pm

A penetration test or a pen test aims to spot network, system, or application vulnerabilities of a company. These mistakes are then shown to the decision-makers, who decide whether or not to correct them.

 A penetration tester submits a report sharing careful info regarding the method and suggests remedial actions. These recommendations are typically mentioned in the falling order of criticalness. As a consequence, executives will decide the way to adequately address them.

Here are some methods, areas, and types of pen testing incorporated by the best penetration testing companies. 

Five Areas of Pen Testing 

Here is a quick overview of six major areas with totally different objectives of penetration testing.

Social Engineering: Penetration testers here impersonate hackers to interrupt a company’s system via a social engineering attack. This checks the detection and reaction approach of workers members. The testing is often worn out in addition to checking security measures that need amendment or improvement. 

Wireless: Examination of aspects like security controls, storage, APIs, configuration, and encryption make up a portion of this penetration testing exercise.

Client-Side: Typically, “client-side” denotes something that happens in the customer’s app (product). This penetration testing space finds vulnerabilities there.

Mobile App: Each machine-driven and extended manual testing is employed to spot any problems associated with session management, cryptography, authentication, and authorization.

Network: Here, penetration testing specialists specialize in cloud-based and on-premise network security testing. This is often done by distinctive internal and external vulnerabilities on totally different network hosts, switches, routers, and servers. 

3 Styles of Pen Testing 

Knowing the way to do penetration testing step by step for the most part depends on the pen testing way suited for your organization. Some issues embrace your budget, tolerance, risks and goals, and alternative factors.

Commonly, there are 3 penetration testing styles. Let’s have a look. 

Black Box: No useful data is provided to the tester. Thus, they’re placed in an associate degree unprivileged scenario kind of like dangerous actors that try and forced the lock of your systems. It’s useful to understand however associate degree mortal with no previous data will breach your IT infrastructure.

Gray: Gray box testing is additionally mentioned as clear box testing. Solely a restricted piece of knowledge like credentials is shared with the tester. This can be done to mimic the actions of a reasonably privileged assaulter to find an associate degree business executive threat. A grey box penetration takes a look and is additionally deployed to identify vulnerabilities among a network circumference. 

White Box: within the white box penetration testing vogue, the corporate provides all the required data associated with its network and system. This is because it takes plenty of your time to conduct this take a look, firms sometimes aim resources at a particular element, instead of testing the total system.

3 Pen Testing Techniques

The three pen testing techniques include:

Automated: Automated pen testing helps eradicate threats by often scanning any prone parts. Another purpose of this method is that it doesn’t need any further code. One machine-controlled penetration testing tool takes care of the entire method. Automated penetration testing is fast, thorough, and efficient.

Manual: This is a reliable methodology during which the tester validates the general performance of the system structure. The manual method starts by gathering information like table names, information versions, device configuration, and third-party plugins (if any). After a radical search to search out any loopholes, a simulated attack is launched. This reveals however critically the system may be affected just in case of the associate actual offense.

Combination: combining each manual and automatic penetration testing ways may be a comprehensive and responsive approach to the security of your company’s assets. Despite operating otherwise, manual and automatic penetration tests fill in varied cracks left by the opposite.