Infrastructure Penetration Test

Objective

The overall purpose of a penetration test is to assess the security level of an IT infrastructure. This achieves multiple goals:

  • Identification of vulnerabilities by a trusted third party before they are exploited by attackers
  • Demonstrate your level of security to your customers / partners
  • Meet legal, contractual, regulatory requirements for obtaining certification, for compliance commitments
  • Gain and maintain trust
  • Keep control on your cyber risks

Methodology and steps

The first step is the definition of the terms of the audit, its objectives, its scope, but also the choice of dates, speakers, format of deliverables and types of tests as well as the establishment of prerequisites.

In a second step, the auditors carry out their tests. If a critical vulnerability is discovered during the audit, the client's contact is notified immediately. Once the tests are complete, the auditors focus on writing the audit report. The report includes an executive summary, the list of flaws found and for each of them the description, observations and associated recommendations.

Finally, a closing meeting is set to present the results of the audit, and the deliverables are given to the sponsor. It will be possible to schedule a cross-audit afterwards to ensure that the corrections made are sufficient and not circumventable.

The tests

The penetration test will check the following points (non-exhaustive list) on the infrastructure and the machines (servers, client workstations, network equipment, hypervisors):

  • Segregation of network segments
  • Compartmentalization of domain users
  • Security level of network protocols
  • Access control
  • Network share rights management
  • Exposure of sensitive documents and applications
  • Misconfigurations
  • Bypassing security mechanisms
  • Components and systems not up to date
  • Accessible and poorly secured services

Vulnerabilities

The following vulnerabilities (non-exhaustive list) are potentially reported during our penetration tests:

  • Open Guest/Anonymous Access
  • Insufficient network partitioning
  • Default SNMP community
  • Vulnerable components
  • Insufficient device access control
  • Obsolete protocols
  • User enumeration with SID
  • Weak password policy
  • Default or weak passwords
  • Known vulnerabilities (CVE, EternalBlue, ZeroLogon, print nightmare...)
  • Pass The Ticket (PTT) (Silver/Golden Ticket, Kerberoast)
  • The Hash Pass (PTH)
  • Overpass The Hash/Pass The Key (PTK)
  • Unsupported operating system
  • Serice vulnerable systems (Juicy Potato, Rotten Potato, AlwaysInstallElevated, unquoted paths)
  • Exposed administration services (RDP, WinRM, SSH)

Standards

Depending on the type of audit, SEC-IT relies on different recognized standards, among which:

Other pentest services

Web Penetration Test

To assess the security of your web applications and APIs

Mobile Application Penetration Test

To assess the security of your Android apps

Cloud Penetration Test

To assess the security of your AWS, Azure, M365, GCP Cloud environments