28 | Penetration testing
Evolve or die!
Industry analysts say that as much as 75 percent of all attacks are now targeted at the application layer. David Harper looks at the changing face of penetration testing and tackles its fundamental flaws.
There are several ways to conduct penetration testing: black box testing assumes no prior knowledge of the system being tested and is often conducted as an outside hacker, white box provides the tester with complete knowledge of the infrastructure and therefore considers the internal threat or someone with inside knowledge. Grey box testing is variations between the two. While the relative merits of these approaches are debated, there are a number of reasons why penetration testing, as it currently stands, is fundamentally flawed:
F T.E.S.T DIGEST | September 2010
or a long-time we have relied on penetration testing to address the threat of attacks aimed at the application layer.
It isn’t deterministic: Despite the
increasing sophistication of the tools available, penetration testing will still come down to two key factors: the skill of the tester, and the time available. If you want to test this theory then the next time you commission a penetration test give the tester more time and he will find more issues! Alternatively, get two different testers to perform a penetration test on the same application and you will find that you get a different list of issues back. It provides the wrong information:
Penetration test reports are despised by the development organisation., Chiefly they report vulnerabilities based on the URL without any real
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