Book Image

Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments: The Ultimate Security Guide

By : Lee Allen
Book Image

Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments: The Ultimate Security Guide

By: Lee Allen

Overview of this book

The internet security field has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade. Everyday more people around the globe gain access to the internet and not all of them with good intentions. The need for penetration testers has grown now that the security industryhas had time to mature. Simply running a vulnerability scanner is a thing of the past and is no longer an effective method of determining a business's true security posture. Learn effective penetration testing skills so that you can effectively meet and manage the rapidly changing security needs of your company. Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments will teach you how to efficiently and effectively ensure the security posture of environments that have been secured using IDS/IPS, firewalls, network segmentation, hardened system configurations and more. The stages of a penetration test are clearly defined and addressed using step-by-step instructions that you can follow on your own virtual lab.The book follows the standard penetration testing stages from start to finish with step-by-step examples. The book thoroughly covers penetration test expectations, proper scoping and planning, as well as enumeration and footprinting. You'll learn how to clean up and compile proof of concept, exploit code from the web, advanced web application testing techniques, client side attacks, post exploitation strategies, detection avoidance methods, generation of well defined reports and metrics, and setting up a penetration testing virtual lab that mimics a secured environment. The book closes by issuing a challenge to your skills and ability to perform a full penetration test against a fictional corporation; followed by a detailed walk through of the solution.Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments is packed with detailed examples that reinforce enumeration, exploitation, post-exploitation, reporting skills and more.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Advanced Penetration Testing for Highly-Secured Environments: The Ultimate Security Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Why bother with setting up labs?


It may seem that experimenting in a more comprehensive testing environment will always be the best choice once you have your labs built out, but in fact, you may only be adding unnecessary complexities that may divert or completely ruin the test.

Let's take a look at setting up a web server to run a simple web application. We will need to determine what we are testing before we choose our lab environment. Some of the questions that should be asked include:

  • Are there any specific services that are required to ensure the testing accurately emulates an environment as seen in real world testing?

    • Load Balancing?

    • Specific versions of software?

      Firewalls?
  • Are there any factors that will cause the results to be an inaccurate representation of what occurs in true production environments?

  • Does your lab provide you with the hands-on experience necessary to duplicate your findings in the real world; if not, what needs to be changed to make it so?

Hopefully this quick list...