RE: Penetration Testing Services

[Jason Hurst <Jason.Hurst () PandaRG com>]

That seems like a fair question,

First off, if you have a penetration tester delivering a Nessus report as their final pen-test, you need to fire them 
immediately.

There is a huge difference between a penetration test, and a vulnerability scan. (If the pen-test is done right)

A Vulnerability Scan will scan a system and compare the results to a known vulnerability database, and then let you 
know what doesn't match. This is a good start, but it can only check a technical configuration. It will not let you 
know how two vulnerabilities on different systems will allow those systems to interact.

Suppose you have a business use case scenario in which you forbid two computers to communicate with each other at all. 
A penetration tester should be able to tell you whether or not they could use a 3rd computer to proxy communications 
between those two segmented computers.

You will never get the same level of insight from a vulnerability scan that you can from a competent penetration tester.

A penetration tester can test not only your technical controls, but your operational controls, network design, and 
adherence to policies.

A vulnerability scan will test only known vulnerabilities on technical controls.

Hope that helps.
 
Jason Hurst
Sr. Network Security Administrator
Panda Restaurant Group
jason.hurst () pandarg com
Please consider the environment before printing this email

-----Original Message-----
From: listbounce () securityfocus com [mailto:listbounce () securityfocus com] On Behalf Of cribbar
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 4:18 AM
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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