Re: Penetration Test Assistance

[Quinn Kuzmich <lostinmoscow () gmail com>]

It's not much of a penetration test, imho, if the "attackers" have detailed
knowledge of your network and systems before the attack.  You should
determine what kind of a scenario you are trying to simulate, and how the
results will be used to improve security.  Is this a "black box" situation,
where you want to see what potential attackers can discover about your
systems without insider information?  Or will this be a step by step,
examine each part of the system and then step back to see what's going on
from a high level scenario?

If you're trying to both reduce vulnerabilities and your attack profile, I
would go for the black box approach and see what your pentesters can come
up with themselves.  Man is a resourceful creature, and you never know what
they could turn up.

Q

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 8:52 AM, Green, Timothy <Timothy.Green () mantech com>wrote:

> Howdy all,
>
> I'm a Security Manager of a large network, we are conducting a Pentest
> next month and the testers are demanding a complete network diagram of the
> entire network.  We don't have a "complete" network diagram that shows
> everything and everywhere we are.  At most we have a bunch of network
> diagrams that show what we have in various areas throughout the country.
> I've been asking the network engineers for over a month and they seem to be
> too lazy to put it together or they have no idea where everything is.
>
> I've never been in this situation before.  Should I be honest to the
> testers and tell them here is what we have, we aren't sure if it's
> accurate;  find everything else?  How would they access those areas that we
> haven't identified?   How can I give them access to stuff that I didn't
> know existed?
>
> What do you all do with your large networks?  One huge network diagram, a
> bunch of network diagrams separated by region, or both?  Any pentest horror
> stories?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tim
>
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