Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing

Provides organizations with the knowledge, awareness, and risk background

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing

A vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing (or ranking) the vulnerabilities in a system. Examples of systems for which vulnerability assessments are performed include, but are not limited to, information technology systems, energy supply systems, water supply systems, transportation systems, and communication systems. Such assessments may be conducted on behalf of a range of different organizations, from small businesses up to large regional infrastructures. Vulnerability from the perspective of disaster management means assessing the threats from potential hazards to the population and to infrastructure. It may be conducted in the political, social, economic or environmental fields.

Vulnerability assessment has many things in common with risk assessment. Assessments are typically performed according to the following steps:

  1. Cataloging assets and capabilities (resources) in a system.
  2. Assigning quantifiable value (or at least rank order) and importance to those resources
  3. Identifying the vulnerabilities or potential threats to each resource
  4. Mitigating or eliminating the most serious vulnerabilities for the most valuable resources

Some of the techniques used by GWC are associated with vulnerability scanning to perform tests are automated, such as:

  • Network scanning using various methods (e.g. SYN scans, UDP scans, ACK scans)
  • Vulnerability scanning to identify various low-hanging vulnerabilities
  • Specialized network scanning for specific protocols (such as SIP, IPMI and SNMP)

For a Penetration Test to be effective, we perform the large number of manual tests allowing us to simulate real attackers which includes:

  • Man-in-the-Middle attacks
  • Exploitation of software that has not been hardened or securely configured
  • Exploitation and demonstration of known vulnerabilities which are typically detected through network scanning but not verified
  • Pass-the-hash (PtH) attacks, lateral movements, NTLM offline bruteforce, credential dumping etc.
  • Default or weak credentials
  • Lack of network access control and proper network segmentation
  • Ways to bypass or abuse security solutions
  • Obvious security issues within the target software (low hanging fruit)
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