Skip to main content

Pentests Don't Make You Secure

I was asked to provide details of the 'Penetration Testing Phase' for a particular project by someone who was putting together a Test Approach Document today. The categories I was asked to fill in were:
  • Objective of the phase
  • Responsibility & Authority
  • Dependencies, risks & assumptions
  • Entry & Exit criteria
When discussing what they really wanted it became clear that they didn't know what a penetration test was or why we do them. The questions and document were set up expecting a deliverable from the pentest itself. The report was being treated as the deliverable without any thought of why a report was being produced or how it will be used. It was a tick in the box - "We require a pentest to be able to go live, so if we've had the report we can tick that box and move on."

Pentesting is not an end in itself. Pentesting is a standard, finite snapshot of the security of a system, which, if taken in isolation as a goal, is fairly useless. Pentests don't make you secure. Performing a pentest and having a report with lots of pretty colours and charts saying that high and critical vulnerabilities exist is only any good if you then remediate or mitigate those vulnerabilities. You could pentest your system every month, but if you never change anything in the system, every report will be the same and you will be as much at risk as you were before you had the pentest done. Indeed, you are likely to get progressively worse results as new vulnerabilities are discovered all the time.

The test and report themselves don't do anything for security. A pentest is used by security professionals to inform and shape a project and decisions. The actions taken based on the findings from a pentest are what improve your security and help you identify the best use of finite resources or, at the very least, enable you to understand the risk. Do you need to perform a pentest? Absolutely you do in order to understand the threat landscape properly and identify vulnerabilities, but it's what you then do with that knowledge that is important and will make you more secure (or not).
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Trusteer or no trust 'ere...

...that is the question. Well, I've had more of a look into Trusteer's Rapport, and it seems that my fears were justified. There are many security professionals out there who are claiming that this is 'snake oil' - marketing hype for something that isn't possible. Trusteer's Rapport gives security 'guaranteed' even if your machine is infected with malware according to their marketing department. Now any security professional worth his salt will tell you that this is rubbish and you should run a mile from claims like this. Anyway, I will try to address a few questions I raised in my last post about this. Firstly, I was correct in my assumption that Rapport requires a list of the servers that you wish to communicate with; it contacts a secure DNS server, which has a list already in it. This is how it switches from a phishing site to the legitimate site silently in the background. I have yet to fully investigate the security of this DNS, however, as most
13 comments
Read more

Security Through Obscurity

I have been reminded recently, while looking at several products, that people still rely on the principle of 'security through obscurity.' This is the belief that your system/software/whatever is secure because potential hackers don't know it's there/how it works/etc. Although popular, this is a false belief. There are two aspects to this, the first is the SME who thinks that they're not a target for attack and nobody knows about their machines, so they're safe. This is forgivable if misguided and false. See my post about logging attack attempts on a home broadband connection with no advertised services or machines. The second set of people is far less forgivable, and those are the security vendors. History has shown that open systems and standards have a far better chance of being secure in the long run. No one person can think of every possible attack on a system and therefore they can't secure a system alone. That is why we have RFCs to arrive at ope
Post a Comment
Read more

How Reliable is RAID?

We all know that when we want a highly available and reliable server we install a RAID solution, but how reliable actually is that? Well, obviously, you can work it out quite simply as we will see below, but before you do, you have to know what sort of RAID are you talking about, as some can be less reliable than a single disk. The most common types are RAID 0, 1 and 5. We will look at the reliability of each using real disks for the calculations, but before we do, let's recap on what the most common RAID types are. Common Types of RAID RAID 0 is the Stripe set, which consists of 2 or more disks with data written in equal sized blocks to each of the disks. This is a fast way of reading and writing data to disk, but it gives you no redundancy at all. In fact, RAID 0 is actually less reliable than a single disk, as all the disks are in series from a reliability point of view. If you lose one disk in the array, you've lost the whole thing. RAID 0 is used purely to speed up dis
Post a Comment
Read more