Thursday, March 5, 2015

Overview of penetration testing

Penetration testing or Pen testing is now in the discussion of top security journals and obviously the reason is not hard to guess – computer systems are getting complicated and to ensure their security now we need comprehensive security plans. Companies are realizing the importance of security paradigm and now investing a lot in getting the best security for their networks and systems. But they are analyzing their system to check vulnerabilities at different levels. This is the point where penetration testing comes under discussion. So what is pen-testing, how to do that and what kind of tools are used in different media industries?

Penetration Testing Dubai

What is Penetration Testing?


It is kind of testing where the areas of weakness in software systems in terms of security are assessed to determine the vulnerabilities, and that can be broken into or not.

How is it performed?

Penetration testing is one of a kind of testing that is a usually the part of complete security paradigm. Here it is broken into important steps so that everyone can understand what the real science behind it is.

Step 1: It starts with a list of vulnerabilities/potential issues that can cause irreversible security issues in the system.

Step 2: Most common these issues are assigned numbers to show their priority or criticality.

Step 3: Device penetration tests that would work (attack your system) from both internal and external aspects to determine if you can access data/network/server/web site unauthorized.

Step 4: If the unauthorized access is possible, the system has to be corrected and the series of steps which must be taken should be written or documents or determine at this stage.

So now the question is who performs the penetration testing – well, obviously testers/ network specialists or simply security consultants.

Penetration tools:


However, there are companies who are willing to do penetration testing using their own resources, especially if they are small-sized companies ¬– here is the list of few amazing tools that can be used to do penetration testing Dubai. These are three top tools in our list:

1) Metasploit

2) Wireshark

3) w3af4

Let’s have a detailed discussion on these few important tools.

Metasploit pen testing tool


This is one of the most advanced and popular frameworks that can be used for pen-testing. It is usually based on the concept of “exploit” which is a code that can easily surpass the security measures and enter a specific system. If entered, it usually runs a payload, a set of code that actually performs operations on the target machine, creating the perfect framework for penetration testing and the benefit of this tool is that it can be used individually. And it is used on almost all platforms such as Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Wireshark


Wireshark is basically a protocol analyzer – famous among testers for its ability to provide the minutest details about your network protocols, decryption and packet information, etc. It can also be used on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and many others.

w3af


W3afis a Web Application Attack and Audit Framework having some great features of fast HTTP requests, web integration and proxy servers into the code. It can also be used on all above-mentioned platforms.

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