Just imagine you are an owner of a small business that started an e-commerce website to sell products online. And your business is thriving and making good profits. But one day, you notice that numerous products are ordered without making any payment, and some files, including backups of your sites, photos, and databases, are mysteriously destroyed from your computer. But if you had been aware of such vulnerabilities beforehand, perhaps it would have been possible to prevent this massive attack. This personal experience often serves as a wake-up call, highlighting the destructive capabilities of hackers who exploit vulnerabilities and use social engineering techniques to steal or destroy sensitive information.
These circumstances can hamper your company’s reputation and the trust of the customers. Nobody wants this. Also, in some hacking movies, you will notice how a malicious attacker can hack a big company’s employee and then compromise the whole network or system.
So now you can easily guess how important it is to know whether our online infrastructure is secure or not. Right? Here is where penetration testing comes into play!
What Is Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing is a simulated cyber attack performed by a cyber security expert with written permission from the business owner to find exploitable vulnerabilities and remediate them before malicious actors exploit them.
In this article, we will explore penetration testing and types of penetration testing. So that you can learn how exactly black hat hackers hack any system and can hamper confidential data and be safe from data breaches. Penetration testing is vital in securing millions of dollars of information for individuals and organizations. The best defense starts with knowing your strengths and weaknesses, as Sun Tzu said, ‘If ignorant of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be imperiled.‘
Penetration Testing, also known as a Pen-Test, is a security exercise where a cyber-security expert attacks a computer or network system to exploit vulnerabilities. The purpose of these simulated attacks is to find and exploit the vulnerable point of the computer system, Which could be an advantage for attackers. So, we can say that penetration testing is a systematic method of finding weaknesses and fixing them before an attacker takes advantage of them.
Why Are Penetration Tests Performed?
Penetration testing is crucial for individual and organizational data. In today’s digital era, data is more valuable than money. And data breaches occur every time. So we should be very careful about our data privacy and make the internet footprints safe.
It is like a company or bank hires a person who dresses up as a Hired Professional and tries to break into the building’s security system. If the Hired Professional succeeds in entering the building, the company or bank will lose their important information. So, using pen testing, the bank or company identifies its weakness and fixes it before the bad hackers exploit the vulnerability.
So we can understand how important Penetration testing is in our digital and social lives.
What Are The Different Approaches To Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing is a great exercise for checking the system or network to exploit vulnerabilities. If the penetration test is done correctly, then the vulnerability of the system or network will be revealed. There are three ( 3 ) main approaches to how the expert does penetration testing.
- Black Box Penetration Testing
- White Box Penetration Testing
- Gray Box Penetration Testing
Black Box Penetration Testing
Black Box Penetration Testing, or external testing, is a cybersecurity exercise that simulates attacks on a system or network. In this type of testing, the tester has no prior knowledge of the target system or network and aims to exploit exploitable vulnerabilities from outside the network. The evaluator works with minimal information, simulating the perspective of a real attacker who could exploit this system or network.
This means Black Box penetration testers analyze programs and systems of targeted systems dynamically, which is currently running. A black box tester must be familiar with automated scanning devices, which will help to gather data from the system or network and also familiar with manual penetration testing. A black box tester is also capable of creating its own map of the network when there is no diagram of the network.
White Box Penetration Testing
White Box Penetration Testing is also known by several different names, including clear-box, logic-driven testing, and open-box. White box testing is the opposite of Black box testing. In white box testing, the tester could access all internal codebases of the system, implementation, and other things. Even the tester knows what the code is supposed to do. It is one of the ways the tester knows all the things and the evaluator also tries to find the vulnerability inside the system, network, and so on so that it can resist all kinds of real-time attacks.
Structural testing is another name for White box Testing, which is the most used technique by security testers. Because they have a clear vision of an application, system, or network, and they don’t even need to create any map of their own. The main purpose behind this testing is to simulate the attacker’s action to try to find vulnerabilities and reduce security risks.
Gray Box Penetration Testing
Gray Box Penetration Testing is an application, network, and system testing method that is combined with the Black and White Box Testing techniques. In Gray Box Testing, the tester knows the system, application, or network’s internal code or workings. It means the tester has some knowledge about the system, application, or network’s code, structure, or any information that could help the tester explore further to find the vulnerability. But not the full knowledge or information about the system, application, or network. Using only Black Box Testing to explore and verify specific functionalities or security vulnerabilities is too challenging. However, using the Gray Box Testing technique makes it easy to identify.
In addition, Gray box testing is often used to focus on specific functionalities or areas of the system that are considered critical or high-risk.
Areas of Penetration Testing
The penetration testing area is huge, but in this article, we would like to know the top and the important ones. Those are well-known Penetration Testing Areas:
- Network Penetration Testing
- Web App Penetration Testing
- Mobile App Penetration Testing
- Client Side Penetration Testing
- Wireless Penetration Testing
- Social Engineering Penetration Testing
Network Penetration Testing
Network penetration testing is one of the common types of penetration tests that is commonly conducted in business. It’s also known as an infrastructure penetration test.
The primary objective of network penetration testing is to scan and explore the vulnerable areas in the network that can be exploited by attackers.
Web App Penetration Testing
Web penetration testing helps to secure the web app before the attackers attack the web application and breach the information.
The scope of web application pen testing is relevant to web-based apps, browsers, and other connotations like Plugins, Silverlight, and so on.
Mobile App Penetration Testing
Mobile app Penetration testing is primarily used to test the security of Android and IOS Operating systems (OS). It’s used to simulate attacks so that it can be fixed to identify, authenticate, authorize, and check data leakage issues.
The tester typically needs to know the mobile app version to simulate the mobile app penetration testing.
Client Side Penetration Testing
In client-side penetration testing, the tester finds vulnerabilities in the Client-side pen testing application. For example, web browsers, email clients, and programs or apps like Gmail, Chrome, Adobe Lightroom, Final Cut Pro, etc.
Wireless Penetration Testing
A wireless penetration test explores connections between all devices connected with a specific organization’s wifi. Those devices include mobiles, tablets, computers, laptops, etc. A tester must, as a rule, be on site to be inside the remote signal range and perform one or more sorts of penetration tests.
Social Engineering Penetration Testing
Social Engineering mainly focuses on human vulnerabilities to trick people into sharing their private information and installing malware. For example, phone numbers, email addresses, banking details, and other sensitive information. There are numerous social Engineering attacks. Those include phishing, vishing, and smishing attacks, scareware attacks, DNS spoofing, etc. To prevent this, social engineering penetration testing helps.
How the Process Works
- Discovery: Gather possible information about the target.
- Scanning: Perform port and vulnerability scanning.
- Exploitation: Attempt to exploit the discovered vulnerabilities.
- Reporting and Recommendations: Writing reports detailing vulnerabilities and recommendations for remediation.
- Retesting and Remediation: Once all vulnerabilities are remediated, Retest the vulnerabilities to confirm the vulnerabilities no longer exist.
Conclusion
Penetration testing is a way to help secure the system and network. A penetration tester can approach any system for the network in 3 ways (black, white, and gray pen testing). There are many more fields for penetration testers.
