During this phase, an operational environment is discussed and established with the help of written/verbal communication & scoping questionnaires, defining:

• Legislational/compliance obligations related to pentesting activities
• Organizational cybersecurity-needs
• Which assets of the organization are to be tested and which are excluded
• Allowed types of attacks
• Testing period and timezones
• Means of communication

Passive OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) techniques are used in combination with neutral observation actions in order to collect as much information as possible regarding the targets to be tested. The more the information, the most attack vectors can be crafted. The intelligence gathered can be of the following types:

• Leaked document and other file types by various search engines
• Exposed robots.txt file
• Past credential leaks
• Forum posts by developers

A plethora of automated tools and manual scanning methods is utilized in order to discover possible entry points and attack vectors. The results will be used as a springboard for implementing exploitation attempts:

• Directories/subdomains enumeration
• Services misconfiguration
• Exposed backup/config files
• Known vulnerabilities (CVE, CVSS, etc.)

Based on the findings of the previous steps, proper attack vectors are designed and executed in order to exploit the detected vulnerabilities/flaws and penetrate into the application. The attacks can be against:

• Authentication Mechanisms
• Session Handling
• Input Validation
• Code Injection
• Request Forgery
• Encryption Mechanisms
• Infrastructure Configuration (Web server, Database server, DNS server)
• Information Disclosure Issues
• Software Versions
• Service Availability (DoS)

Reports are a crucial step in a penetration testing engagement as the cornerstone deliverable which provide meaningful insights regarding the security posture of your organization, along with remediation recommendation for each detected risk. Our reports are built upon the following elements:

• Executive summary for the management board, C-level executives
• Intelligence report for mid-level roles
• Detailed Technical report regarding the findings
• Prioritized risk-based reporting
• Traceability steps for each finding (traceID ™)
• Security readiness badge (SpearBadge ™)
• Remediation recommendations

SpearIT can additionally offer mitigation verification services, which are executed after a penetration test report delivery and ensure the continuous and proper security readiness of your organization against known threats. The verification procedure aims to approve the proper implementation of the proposed mitigation measures and to detect any new vulnerability which may arise from the reconfiguration activities which would probably occur in the context of mitigation.