In our previous skill, we began to take a look at the actual pen testing phases
,
and we went over them one by one to make sure that we understood the different
parts of the
actual pen test itself without getting too far in the weeds on some of the
tools that we would
use to be able to do that. Well, I want to show you this real quick, and what
we're taking a look
at here is exactly what we talked about and the five phases of pen testing. Now
, I apologize,
I made this in PowerPoint, and I'm still learning how to use it because I'm not
exactly the most
artistic person in PowerPoint, but I wanted to bring this up for a very
specific reason because,
in actuality, the pen testing lifestyle, the pen testing lifecycle is more like
this,
and it's all over the place. The biggest thing that we need to remember is that
at any time,
you could be sent from vulnerability assessment all the way back to
reconnaissance, and that the
five phases of pen testing are there as more of a guideline to break down the
different portions
of what we do as pen testers, while the lifecycle itself outlines how the
different phases are utilized
that do out the course of a pen test. That's important to remember that when we
start pen testing,
that we want to use the five phases as a beginning, middle, and end for the
overall structure of how
we're going to put together our information and tools to be able to conduct a
proper pen test
against an organization that we've been hired to work for. But when we take a
look at the actual
lifecycle itself, it could be that, like we said in our example, that we get
sent back to another
phase of the actual pen test. This could be for a wide variety of reasons. Let
's say, for instance,
that we're starting to conduct a scan, and we're not being so discreet about it
. We're using something
like in map, and it's going through doing a quick scan. And the IPS of the
network is going through
and blocking a lot of that network traffic coming from our source that we're
utilizing.
The reason is because the IPS has a rule in it to detect anomalies along with
what looks like
suspicious activity. Basically, a lot of packets coming from one source to a
widespread of different
devices all at once. And quite honestly, those rules are kind of default when
we take a look at
IPSs. So if we go back and take a look at our actual five phases in accordance
with the lifecycle
of pen testing, we can see that in this particular case, we would be in
scanning. So we got kicked
back. We want to continue to do our scan. We might need to go back to
reconnaissance and continue to
work through some of our issues to be able to conduct a proper scan, but using
a different method.
Because that scanning helped us build out our reconnaissance for the overall
network and systems.
While at the same time, also reporting in our notes and also getting ready for
the final,
you know, executive summary of the pen test and lessons learned and just make
it sure we don't
make the same mistake twice in reporting. So we keep our notes and we write
down and keep track of
everything that we've learned so far. Because one thing that we don't want to
do is go back and
make the same mistakes twice. Now, I know in pen testing, it's less about
getting caught and more
about testing the overall organization to make sure that they don't have any
vulnerabilities.
But let's say you're on a red team blue team scenario inside of the Department
of Defense
from the United States. And this is where I made my bread and butter for quite
some time, because
I would either be assigned to a red team or a blue team, depending on how we
all felt at the time.
And it was the objective of either team to beat the others. So if we're on the
red team, we're
actually trying to go in past the blue team and break into things and, you know
, capture the flag
type thing. If we're the blue team, we're trying to prevent the red team in a
certain amount of
time from capturing that flag. And these are different types of pen testing
methodologies
that as we continue throughout the course, we'll start to learn about more
deeply. Because as
pen testing goes, all we're concerned with right now is just understanding how
to actually conduct
a basic pen test. We'll get into some of the fun things later on as far as like
challenges
going, whatnot.