Penetration Testing mailing list archives
Re: Penetration Testing Services
From: Justin Klein Keane <justin () madirish net>
Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:49:25 -0400
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, the real difference between a physical tester and a piece of software is that the human can make connections that are impossible to encode in algorithms. There are tons of examples but some quick ones include the fact that a human tester can follow a chain of functionality that can lead to a vulnerability. Nessus can check to see if known vulnerabilities appear in versions of software it can discover. A human can figure out if your CMS allows anonymous users to create new accounts, if account holders can log in and view forums, whether or not forums provide clues to the identity of super user accounts, and whether or not an account holder might be able to escalate privilege using an internal messaging system to send malicious messages to admins. Software just can't follow that chain of events. Furthermore software can't effectively deal with data classifications. For instance, if your secret soda recipe is publicly available to anyone who can guess the right URL, Nessus will never warn you. Nessus might find the content, but it can't evaluate the content or determine if it should fall under a specific protection realm. Only a skilled penetration tester who understands your business can tell you if you're unintentionally leaking critical business data. Of course, there are many penetration testers who won't give you this sort of data either, so be sure to vet anyone you select. Justin C. Klein Keane http://www.MadIrish.net The digital signature on this message can be confirmed using the public key at http://www.madirish.net/gpgkey On 08/03/2010 03:14 AM, Sherif Eldeeb wrote:
IMHO, you mixed "Vulnerability Assessment" with "Penetration Testing". Firing Nessus, nmap, W3AF and nikto at an IP range, then going for a coffee waiting for them to finish, then printing the logs for the management is barely considered an ill "Vulnerability Assessment", but I believe "penetration testing" will simulate a real-world attack scenario that will include the whole "vulnerability assessment" phase as a step to get to the final goal, bearing in mind that during a penetration test the process of vulnerability identification will be as stealthy as possible and will most probably rely on manual techniques rather than noisy automated tools. Penetration testing is conducted to know how the bad guys could infiltrate your network and exploiting every found hole, not only testing your software's patch level, it will/should include every way to break in, i.e. Physical security, Social engineering, manual web application assessment...etc. Nessus will not detect the uneducated secretary who will open the mail-attachment from someone she doesn't know, or prevent the stranger from plugging in his wireless access point to the unnoticed RJ45 plug behind the sofa in the lobby... you got the idea. Your confusion is understandable, since lots of so called "penetration testers" are actually "script kiddies" with nice looking tuxedos who do no good other than what your security team is already doing, "real" penetration testers will give you a detailed professional report highlighting other weaknesses as well... Regards, Sherif Eldeeb. -----Original Message----- From: listbounce () securityfocus com [mailto:listbounce () securityfocus com] On Behalf Of cribbar Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 2:18 PM To: pen-test () securityfocus com Subject: Penetration Testing Services Penetration Testing Community - I am interested in getting an expert response to a discussion that keeps raising up in our company. First off, I have some basic IT/Infrastructure knowledge, but I am most definitely not up to the level of a penetration tester (please bare this in mind with your responses). Basically, our company has an internal IT Security section, who has recently purchased some of the popular vulnerability assessment software such as Nessus. They are running quarterly scans using Nessus across an IP range and producing a report to senior management on the types of security holes in the Network and how they can be fixed (and more importantly to management how much it is going to cost to fix). I’ve spent a couple of hours on the Nessus website looking at the types of “vulnerability” it will catch, and it seems to cover a whole array of topics and security issues. This leads to the inevitable comment from senior management, if we have an IT Security section who are using the most common vulnerability scanning / penetration testing tools –what is the point in investing significant $$$ in buying in a 3rd party to do exactly the same? I fully appreciate that penetration testing is an area of high skill, as a 3rd party you provide an independent neutral security review, it takes years to master the topic, and once mastered you need to stay up to date with all the current vulnerabilities and exploits, and it is your guy’s area of expertise, whereas a security admin is not specific to penetration testing. And let’s be honest, anyone can essentially download a user friendly piece of software and click “scan” or whatever and produce a report listing problems. However, in order to be in defence of the pen testing community during such discussions, I have a few questions…. • How do you as penetration testers, portray the importance of this independent check to future potential clients? Is this independence really that important? • What broadly speaking do you as professional penetration testers bring additional to a nessus scan during the services you provide? If there are categories of security issues/vulnerabilities that you can flag up doing one of your penetration tests that Nessus wont - that would be incredibly useful to know, and I’d love to be able to identify the limitations of Nessus scans but I am a bit out of my depth to be able to do so. • I trawled through the archives of this forum and others, and it seems some pen testing companies use the exact same tools such as nmap and nessus, and in some cases simply pass across a Nessus report for a specific IP range and that’s the report they use. This to me sounds a complete rip off, and I can’t see the benefit. So where is the added benefit in having an internal security guy run nessus, and paying a 3rd party pen tester x amount of $$$ money to do exactly the same? Why not just stick with the internal guy? Or am I missing something? I really would appreciate real examples of whereby just running Nessus is simply not enough as it wont catch a, b and c! I look forward to your comments.
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Current thread:
- Penetration Testing Services cribbar (Aug 02)
- RE: Penetration Testing Services Sherif Eldeeb (Aug 03)
- Re: Penetration Testing Services Justin Klein Keane (Aug 03)
- Re: Penetration Testing Services k.x86 (Aug 03)
- Re: Penetration Testing Services Robin Wood (Aug 03)
- RE: Penetration Testing Services Jason Hurst (Aug 03)
- Re: Penetration Testing Services Andre Gironda (Aug 03)
- Re: Penetration Testing Services Richard Miles (Aug 16)
- RE: Penetration Testing Services Mathew Sealy (Aug 03)
- Message not available
- Re: Penetration Testing Services Jonathan Leigh (Aug 03)
- RE: Penetration Testing Services Sherif Eldeeb (Aug 03)
- Re: Penetration Testing Services BMF (Aug 03)
- Re: Penetration Testing Services Todd Hughes (Aug 03)
- RE: Penetration Testing Services Hugo V. Garcia R. (Aug 03)