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How to Write an Effective Penetration Test Report

What Is an Effective Penetration Testing Report?

Following the recent trend of cyberattacks against IT infrastructure, service organizations have a steady rise in demand to conduct penetration testing on IT resources to ensure all vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated. Penetration testing is a technical cybersecurity procedure targeted at finding security flaws in a company’s internal and external networks, web applications, and systems. After a penetration test is completed, the testers must provide a penetration test report that documents the security issues identified during the assessment.

A penetration testing report is issued to an organization to present the risk associated with the security vulnerabilities identified in the infrastructure and provide remediation steps to fix the identified risk exposure. The test objective can be fulfilled based on the adequacy of the penetration testing report. Hence, a well-documented penetration testing report is as important as the penetration test itself. Below you can see the difference between the two types of penetration testing reports:

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Web Application Pen Testing Steps, Methods, and Tools

Did you know, 88% of organizations worldwide experienced phishing attempts in 2019? Lately, web application security has become a major concern for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Web application security is referred to as safeguarding of websites, web applications, and web services from existing and emerging security threats that exploit weaknesses in application source code.

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A Complete Guide to the Stages of Penetration Testing

As per the new study, 95 percent of all successful hacks in the companies worldwide are the result of spearfishing. This is a kind of an email spoofing that targets a particular company or individual for stealing steal sensitive information or gain a grip on the network. 

As per the Statista, fig shows the nations majorly targeted by phishing attacks globally during 1st quarter 2020

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Penetration Test Types for (REST) API Security Tests

Black Box, Grey Box, and White Box Pen Tests

In my last article, we discussed Penetration tests, or pen tests, the importance of pen tests, and how it helps to find the REST API vulnerabilities. 

This article gives a brief overview of one of the pen tests type called white box pen tests. There are two more types called black box and grey box testing. However, black box and grey box penetration tests assume the tester has only limited knowledge about the target system, and this article focus is on API pen tests also discussed a few details on why it is a preferred test type of API penetration tests and summarized with a few tools that enable the pen tests for our APIs.

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What Is Cybersecurity Research Today?

Cybersecurity research has, it seems, two main thrusts. Both of them seem similar at first glance, but one is more lucrative (though not as impactful) while the other has much more impact (but doesn't seem to pull in the cash). Let's give an overview of various cybersecurity careers first, and then segue into what cyber R&D is today.

From a career perspective, you can first split jobs into either offensive or defensive specialties. Now, granted, this is a somewhat artificial delineation. After all, if you work in any corporate cybersecurity department, you've got someone either on staff or on call that can analyze suspected malware or do some post-incident forensics. But generally, offensive folks do things like pen testing and vulnerability analysis while defensive folks implement and monitor cybersecurity controls and policies in organizations. We can include forensics work and malware analysis as defensive fields. They're not a perfect fit, but as they're not focused specifically on attacking systems, let's lump them in with defensive fields.