Penetration (pen) tester and hacker are similar terms. The difference is that penetration testers work for an organization to prevent hacking attempts, while hackers hack for any purpose such as fame, selling vulnerability for money, or to exploit vulnerability for personal enmity.
Lots of well-trained hackers have got jobs in the information security field by hacking into a system and then informing the victim of the security bug(s) so that they might be fixed.
A hacker is called a penetration tester when they work for an organization or company to secure its system. A pentester performs hacking attempts to break the network after getting legal approval from the client and then presents a report of their findings. To become an expert in pentesting, a person should have deep knowledge of the concepts of their technology. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
In simple words, penetration testing is to test the information security measures of a company. Information security measures entail a company's network, database, website, public-facing servers, security policies, and everything else specified by the client. At the end of the day, a pentester must present a detailed report of their findings such as weakness, vulnerability in the company's infrastructure, and the risk level of particular vulnerability, and provide solutions if possible.
There are several points that describe the significance of pentesting:
Consider an example of a well-reputed e-commerce company that makes money from online business. A hacker or group of black hat hackers find a vulnerability in the company's website and hack it. The amount of loss the company will have to bear will be tremendous.
An organization should conduct a risk assessment operation before pentesting; this will help identify the main threats such as misconfiguration or vulnerability in:
Testing should be performed on all hardware and software components of a network security system.
The following points describe the qualities of good pentester. They should:
A pentester tests the network using manual techniques or the relevant tools. There are lots of tools available in the market. Some of them are open source and some of them are highly expensive. With the help of programming, a programmer can make his own tools. By creating your own tools, you can clear your concepts and also perform more R&D. If you are interested in pentesting and want to make your own tools, then the Python programming language is the best, as extensive and freely available pentesting packages are available in Python, in addition to its ease of programming. This simplicity, along with the third-party libraries such as scapy and mechanize, reduces code size. In Python, to make a program, you don't need to define big classes such as Java. It's more productive to write code in Python than in C, and high-level libraries are easily available for virtually any imaginable task.
If you know some programming in Python and are interested in pentesting this module is ideal for you.
Before we get into pentesting, the scope of pentesting should be defined. The following points should be taken into account while defining the scope:
The scope of pentesting is defined in two types of tests: