What is Penetration Testing in Cybersecurity? A Beginner’s Guide

In the modern digital world, almost all the actions that we are engaged in is intertwined with technology. From making payments through UPI and booking a film or tickets for tourist tickets to the sale of products through e -commerce platforms, the technology has become an integral part of our daily life.

To make sure that these actions are safe and safe, DV commands must have a reliable security test structure. This helps to identify vulnerability, prevent cyberism and maintain the integrity of digital transactions.

In this article, you will learn everything about testing for penetration – what it is, why each stage of the process is important, and tools that are used, which are used by which their work use.

What is penetration testing?

Penetration testing is a practice used by security specialists to help companies and teams provide their data. The company provides Security Pro permission to try to find vulnerability in its system. Then Security Pro reports on any potential weaknesses that they find in the company so that they can fix them. This helps these companies prevent potential attacks before hackers can access their data.

If the company cannot be captured, this can lead to serious consequences, such as politics violations, the provision of large provisions on compliance, loss of customer confidence and a decrease in the organization’s reputation and the total value of the business.

There are four stages of testing for penetration:

1. Intelligence

2. Scanning

3. Operation

4. Submission report

Let’s go through each of them so that you can find out what is involved in the whole process.

Intelligence: the art of collecting information

Intelligence includes collecting information about the target system or network. The purpose of the holler here is to collect as much data about the goal as possible, helping them understand the architecture of the goal, identify potential vulnerabilities and develop an effective attack strategy.

In intelligence, testing can be carried out in various ways, such as viewing social networks to obtain information about the goal, the use of tools for collecting information, such as Theharvester, to crawl websites associated with the target area, and much more.

At this stage, all available data are either technical or non-lactic-collected without filtering for relevance. The goal is to collect as much information as possible, since even seeming insignificant details can subsequently be useful in the attack.

Intelligence is crucial for a successful penetration test. Thus, this can be a time -consuming process, which often takes from several hours to several weeks, depending on the complexity of the goal.

Types of intelligence

We can classify intelligence into two main types based on the level of interaction with the target system:

Firstly, we have passive intelligence. This includes the collection of information from public sources Without direct interaction with the target system. Since direct contact is not established, it is hidden and less often prevents the target.

At this stage, the question may arise: if testing for penetration is carried out with a preliminary approval of the target region, why should we carry out passive intelligence in order to minimize direct interaction when we have freedom to perform active reconnaissance?

Well, the penetration tester should think from the point of view of an unethical hacker. Attackers often rely on passive intelligence methods in order to collect critical information, without preventing the goal, which makes it the most important phase in ethical hacking.

That is why the penetration test should include passive intelligence. This helps to determine the potential leaks of information, such as public announcements of the target company or employees publishing doubts related to coding, such platforms as Supack, which can lead to unauthorized access to the system.

Active intelligence, on the other hand, includes Direct interaction With the target system to extract specific information. General methods include port scan, capture of a banner and sniffing a network.

This approach provides more accurate and detailed information, but it comes with a higher risk – the IP -open tester or a digital trace can be registered with the target system.

For the reconnaissance phase on the Internet, many tools are available. But some are considered highly effective and popular among penetration testers. Some of them include jellyfish and Harvester.

As an example here, we will use Theharvester to collect information about the target domain (zudio.com) and analyze various types of data obtained by the tool.

You can see that the tool crawled with a bold search engine and found a couple of IP -addresses along with the additional subdomain of the target domain (zudio.com). These results must be properly documented and included in the reconnaissance report.

Scanning: the art of detecting loopholes

The information that the tribal collects during the reconnaissance phase serves as an important entry for the scanning phase. These data help them get a deeper idea of ​​the target system, allowing them to define areas and filter data that requires further analysis.

Thanks to a wide range of available scanning tools, pentesters use various methods for:

• Determine open ports, as they can serve as potential entry points.

• Monitoring of network activity to detect vulnerability and safety gaps.

Scan phases

Scanning usually includes two key steps:

First, we have Port -scanningwhich identifies open and closed ports in the target system. This helps to determine which services work and are potentially used.

System ports serve as entry points for a computer system to perform various tasks. Ensuring that all unnecessary ports are closed is crucial for security. Leave additional ports open can create potential entry points for hackers.

You can use tools such as NMAP, NETCAT, MASSCAN For this.

For a better understanding, let’s scan a sample of the target domain (192.168.13.136), using NMAP and check which service ports are open.

Next, we have Scanning vulnerabilitywhich detects weaknesses in the software, configurations and services. This helps pentesters to evaluate security risks associated with identified ports and services.

Let’s use the same NMAP tool to detect vulnerabilities from identified open ports. In the scan results, you can see that Port 21 is open, and this port is specially used for the file transfer protocol.

Here we launch the NMAP at the target address (192.168.13.136) to scan the FTP 21 port using the FTP-Brute script. This allows us to check whether the FTP service is available using users and default passwords.

During scanning, we were able to extract additional useful information, including detailed information about the version of the FTP server (VSFTPD 2.3.4). This information can be valuable to identify potential vulnerability in this version.

Finally, the tool successfully determined the vulnerability on the server, finding the actual user names and passwords from the list of the dictionary included in the tool.

In general, intelligence and scanning are often overlooked by security analysts, suggesting that they are not important. But these phases provide a valuable data set and a deeper understanding of the target area. They help in the filtering and direction of the operation process, allowing the penetration testers to focus on specific vulnerabilities, and not blindly try to make various exploits.

Passing these stages leads to inefficiency, waste of time, resources and efforts. Thus, for successful operation, it is necessary to carefully collect information and scan before continuing.

Operation: the art of simulation of attack

The result of the scanning phase gives pentesters a clear understanding of potential entry points, usually called “open doors” through identified ports and services. These ideas help the testers determine what vulnerabilities can be used to model a real cyber attack.

After identifying vulnerabilities, the testers deploy various attack methods to assess their effects. The goal is to demonstrate how a malicious hacker can get unauthorized access and threaten the target system. Some general attack methods include:

• SQL -Injection – Using the vulnerabilities of the database.

• The scripts of the transverse site (XSS) – The introduction of malicious scenarios in the web application.

• Boofer overflow – Relting memory to execute the malicious code.

• The gross power of the attack – Clushing weak passwords for access to the system.

For a more clear understanding, let’s look at how the vulnerabilities of the database are used using SQL infection attacks.

Suppose, in the form of entering the system there is a user and password field. As a rule, when the user is included in his accounting data, the system receives these input values, builds a SQL request and sends it to the server for authentication.

SQL injection works, manipulating this request to get around the authentication. At the basic level, the attacker can introduce specially created values ​​to change the logic of the request. For example, consider the following SQL request:

SELECT * FROM PRODUCTS WHERE USERNAME = " OR 1=1 -- " AND PASSWORD = "1234"

Let’s deal with this exploit to see what is happening:

• The condition or 1 = 1 is always evaluated in the truth, which means that the request makes all records from the database.

• A -- The sequence is an operator of comments in SQL, which ignores the rest of the request (including password checking).

As a result, the attacker gains access without acceptable accounting data, effectively bypassing authentication.

Sending report: The art of verification

The final stage of testing for penetration includes a message about the vulnerability revealed during the security test cycle. These reports are crucial for the management of the recovery process, guaranteeing that the company turns to any weaknesses before they can be used.

Report reports for penetration, as a rule, include detailed information about the attacks, relevant results and evaluating them. It is important to note that the language used in these reports is non -lactic, since the results are often divided with various teams throughout the organization, including:

These reports should be easily understandable and confidential, since they may contain confidential information about the vulnerability of the organization.

The report should include the following key parameters:

• The number of employees involved

• Start date and expiration date date

• List of target domains

• List of open ports (if any)

• A list of identified vulnerabilities, classified by risk level (critical, high, medium, low, informational)

• Preventive measures to reduce risks

• List of tools used during assessment

Although the structure and content of these reports may vary from the organization to the organization, the above parameters are mandatory for a comprehensive security assessment.

The goal is to ensure that the interested parties at all levels of the organization can take appropriate actions, whether it is a correction of vulnerability, a revision of the policy or updating the security strategy.

Conclusion

The life cycle of penetration is continuous, and this is that your team should periodically perform. You cannot just do it once, solve these problems and forget about it.

Since new vulnerabilities arise with the release of updated versions of software, applications and systems, testing for penetration remains necessary to identify and solve these new risks.

A preemptive approach to security through continuous testing for penetration is crucial to maintain a safe and safe digital environment for organizations and their users.