Alright, so we've got time stamps, commands, got the history configured to be
able to
include time stamps, then over some of the things that we need to be on the
lookout for
for time skew.
Let's get into taking notes.
And this is going to be a big part of everything else we do all throughout the
skill, so I
kind of want a hammer on this now instead of having to nickel and dime it all
the way
throughout the entirety of the course.
So let's go back and remember.
The five phases of pen testing and they go down to reconnaissance, scanning,
vulnerability
assessment, exploitation and reporting.
Now I know what you're thinking important has its own section that should be
where all
the notes are, right?
Wrong.
We need to make sure that we're keeping notes the entirety of the time because
when we do
get to reporting, it's going to be that executive summary that we're going to
cover in a little
bit, but we also need to make sure that with the notes that we do have that we
either don't
repeat a step by accident, don't mess up a step by accident or do anything else
by accident.
And during the reconnaissance phase, we're going through and basically scoping
out the
entirety of what's entire within the organization that's within our rules of
engagement.
This is our time for us to gather that preliminary information.
And the note taking comes critical because there may be items or systems within
the organization
that were pen testing that don't need to be touched.
And that would be something that we need to make note of.
And I've said this before in terms of like, make a note of it.
This is what we're actually talking about now because if there's a particular
target
system out there that does not need to be touched and it was inside the rules
of engagement
and we didn't make a note of it, that could really come back to bite us in the
butt because
it's either going to get us canceled out of a contract, we may have to recoup
some
costs and that does happen.
When we're actively scanning, just like we saw in the N-Map earlier, there's
going to
be a lot of information that comes back and the scope within the rules of
engagement can
go even deeper.
We're allowed to attack some ports but not others.
We're allowed to attack some systems based on time and not others.
And the notes that we get during the scanning process basically allow us to be
able to keep
track of the different vulnerabilities, the different systems out there and
also be able
to know what kind of a service plane that we're attack surface that we have for
those
particular systems within the scope of our pen test.
So the notes for this one would be if you wanted to imagine real quick, a
spreadsheet
could be something like this.
One nine two one six eight zero dot one through two fifty five and then based
on the ports,
you know, the commonly found ports are the ones that you want to attack or the
ones that
are open, you could say zero dot one had port 80 open and 443 and go through
line by line.
Instead of having to rerun thing all the time or rerun your scanning.
Now you will rerun scans as you go throughout your pen testing process because
certain systems
do different things based on different times of day and different activity with
the user.
But it's good to have a baseline of notes taken on the side to make sure that
we're
all in line with this.
And the same thing goes with vulnerability.
If you have a specific system out there that has a vulnerability report or
different
whole network systems out there, you can actually go through the actual
vulnerability report
itself and go through and make notes on it of hey, I scanned it at this time,
which will
be in the vulnerability assessment itself or you can go through and note on
there, hey,
I've ran across this vulnerability before and I've leveraged it with Metasploit
using
this plug in and just something to keep note on the side of.
Exploitation kind of in the same vein of this, you know, what results are you
getting
back and did you find something else during the exploitation that you wanted
nine deeper
on and you can make a note of that.
And then all of it gets pulled all together and tallied up between you, me and
the team
that we have together to be able to build out that executive summary.