Network Penetration testing- Security Measures Through Ethical Hacking

Network Penetration testing- Security Measures Through Ethical Hacking

Information technology has become an integral part of every business and industry sector. Cloud computing and virtualization of desktops having facilitated a globalized workspace, the data and information have become easily available across organizations, irrespective of the geographical location.  This has also brought in the concerns of security lapses in the networking environment and vulnerability of the data in a techno savvy business environment.

Organizations use testing tools such as vulnerability scanners to identify security vulnerabilities in a cloud hosting services environment. However, these vulnerability assessments only highlight the technical threat and do not consider the business threat or the common attack methods.

Such scanning methods do not provide a foolproof system of the security issues and leaves scope for further security breaches.

Network penetration tools also called ethical hacking tools are software tools, which allow the user to discover information about networks and interfere with traffic on the network. Managed service providers generally use network penetration software to check the security or performance gaps in a client network. Standard functions include gathering information about a network's topology, scanning for port vulnerabilities and launching denial-of-service attacks.  A network penetration tool gives an overview of the network, which makes it possible to pinpoint on the weak links on the network.

Conventional testing involves manual methods, which may miss out on all possible attack paths.

The use of penetration tests help to resolve this problem in the longer run. The network pen test identifies & prioritizes the threats using the relationship between different hosts in the network. It even takes into consideration the minor vulnerabilities that may be used to exploit other critical systems through an inter-dependent relationship. This exploits the network to find the real threats and loopholes, thereby enabling organization to effectively prioritize and take remedial actions to radically improve the overall security issues. Based on automated testing techniques, this features business logic verification and an online vulnerability management dashboard.

Internal threats are the greatest risk faced by many organizations today. The corporate LAN/WAN environments allow users greater amounts of access with fewer security controls. Traditional penetration testing disciplines are the network penetration testing and the server penetration testing. The network penetration testing techniques is used for infrastructure penetration testing such as routers switches, and firewalls. The server pen test on the other hand is used in case of operating systems and applications. The advent of technology has brought in advanced tools for disciplines such as application penetration, wireless, virtualization, database and Sharepoint servers.