Penetration Testing
Penetration testing is a method that many companies follow in order to minimize their security breaches. This is a controlled way to hire a professional who will try to hack your system and show you the loopholes you need to fix.
Before doing a penetration test, it is mandatory to have an agreement that will explicitly mention the following parameters –
- when will the penetration test take place ?
- where will be the IP source of the attack ?
- what will be the fields of penetration of the system ?
Penetration testing is performed by professional ethical hackers who primarily use commercial open source tools, automation tools, and manual controls. There is no restriction; the most important goal here is to discover as many security holes as possible.
Penetration Testing Types
These are the types of Penetration Testing mentioned as below.
Black Box
Here, the ethical hacker has no information about the infrastructure or network of the organization he is seeking to penetrate. In black-box penetration tests, the hacker tries to find the information on his own.
Grey Box
This is a type of penetration test where the ethical hacker has partial knowledge of the infrastructure, such as its domain name server.
White Box
In white-box penetration testing, the ethical hacker receives all the necessary information about the infrastructure and network of the organization that he is to penetrate.
External Penetration Testing
This type of penetration testing primarily focuses on the network infrastructure or servers and their software running under the infrastructure. In this case, the ethical hacker attempts the attack using public networks via the Internet. The hacker attempts to hack the company’s infrastructure by attacking its web pages, web servers, public DNS servers, etc.
Internal Penetration Testing
In this type of penetration testing, the ethical hacker is inside the corporate network and performs their tests from there.
Penetration testing can also cause issues such as system malfunction, system crash, or data loss. Therefore, a business should take calculated risks before performing penetration testing. The risk is calculated as follows and it is a management risk.