Pen testing is a challenging job. If you ask an experienced pen tester about their work, they will tell you about the endless hours they spend doing their jobs, before they succeed and finish their task. But it’s not always as easy. Many a times they have to perform the process repeatedly, whether due to a small configuration mistake while exploiting a vulnerability or being unable to find a main target.
In reality, it’s quite a journey to master the job of penetration testing. It includes several failures before one achieves the much-deserved success.
Table of Contents
Let’s have a look at five common penetration testing mistakes:
1. Professional Ethics
The basic difference between a hacker and ethical hacker is legality. Carrying out a penetration test not only requires a high-level of technical ability, it also needs one to follow professional ethics. It’s very common during this type of work to gain access to confidential or sensitive information. This could include security breach details that can potentially expose a corporation to real attacks. Hence, a good penetration tester should be able to handle the aspects of privacy, confidentiality and legality in a serious manner.
2. Conducting a Pen Test Without Proper Authorisation
As a penetration tester, one still needs to follow the rules. Work only for what you are authorised to. As a pen tester, you may feel eager to demonstrate your ability and knowledge and may lose focus on the real objectives. However, it’s important to follow the scope of assessment and consider what type of tests can be performed, the time window of execution and assets that should not be touched.
3. The Evidence
An important part of pen testing is to collect and adequately store evidence during testing, as it forms the basis of the final report. Many times, penetration testers forget to keep important information as evidence. For instance, the vulnerabilities that were successfully exploited, a timestamp, activities that can be performed or the number of unsuccessful tries. This information is collectively important to build a fact-based report.
4. Exclusively Relying on Tools
Tools can make a pen tester’s life easier. But relying solely on penetration testing tools is not enough to become a skilled tester. In most of the cases, even the best solution will require a skilled professional to define what to scan and how to build context-specific exploit. They must know the concept behind an intrusion test.
5. Report Writing Skills
The final step of the pen testing process is to write a comprehensive report of each activity performed along with the findings. An experienced professional should not only use automated tools to create a report. They should also be able to create meaningful reports related to their client’s business context.
We at Aardwolf Security have a professional penetration testing team with years of experience in the industry. Get in touch with us today for penetration testing quote.
