External Penetration Test

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 






What is External Penetration Testing ?

External Penetration Testing is also known as external network penetration testing. It is a type of  security assessment of an organization's perimeter systems. A perimeter comprises of all those systems that are directly reachable from the internet. Because they are out in the open and are the most exposed systems, they are most easily and regularly attacked. 

Hence, the main aim of an external pentest is to determine ways to compromise the accessible (external) systems and services, gain access to sensitive information, and discover methods an attacker can use the users or clients. They will also test the extent of any weaknesses discovered to see how far a malicious attacker could burrow into a network and what the business impact of a successful attack would be. 

Asset Discovery

Assets can be a website or a web application or an API that are intended to be found or discovered with the help of asset discovery tools. After the identification and fixation of all the vulnerabilities and attack routes, these assets can be leveraged as targets. So, in order to discover those assets, the penetration tester must-
  1. Find the primary company's acquisitions, this is important to fall inside the predetermined scope. 
  2. Find each firm's Autonomous System Number (ASN) if any, it will provide the IP ranges owned by the company.
  3. Find further entries, via reverse lookups.
  4. Utilize other methods, like shodan that scans the internet, to look for more assets.

After recognizing all the assets within the scope, the penetration tester will start scanning the network for vulnerabilities. The most popular tool to do it are Nessus and OpenVas. Simultaneous port scans should also be done to look for open ports. The type of open ports and the services running on them may help a tester in identifying a running operating system and create an image on what to anticipate next.

Domain Discovery

Now the penetration tester is laced with all the relevant information about the assets that the targeted company or client has in their possession. The tester must visit the main domain and learn everything about the company. A reverse DNS lookups can also be run on the known IPs to further discover more domains inside the scope. 

Numerous useful details, like an organization's name, address, email address, and phone number, may be found inside a whois. However, if a tester conducts a reverse whois lookup by any of those data, he might discover other assets connected to the company.

On the contrary, there are many ways to discover subdomains. One of them is using dnsrecon and check if a zone transfer is possible. The other techniques include, scraping, brute-force, dns cache, snooping, etc.

Conclusion

In this topic, we learnt more about external penetration testing in detail.





























































































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