John Pescatore

Back in early late 1990′s and early 2000′s, penetration testing got a bad name. Mostly because there were a lot of  small security consulting firms sprouting up and offering penetration tests for $500 or less, and these pen tests weren’t all that much different than what more established firms had charging tens of thousands of dollars for. That caused conventional wisdom to basically dismiss pen testing just vulnerability scanning with good Powerpoint to scare management.

But back in 2006, I saw a rapidly increasing amount of Gartner clients getting hit by advanced, targeted attacks, and lead a research noted calls “Penetration Testing Augments Vulnerability Management to Deal With Changing Threats” saying:

Deeper penetration testing (also known as pen testing) is needed to augment existing vulnerability management processes, especially in light of the rising level of targeted attacks, but the technique must be applied in the appropriate situations.

Flash forward five years to today, and the continued growth of targeted threats (and the recent hype of Advanced Persistent Threats) has lead to a large increase in Gartner client calls around penetration testing. I go through a decision framework with Gartner clients (soon to be a Gartner Research Note) on contracting for pen testing, vs. doing it yourself and how to choose the best product or service provider.

One recommendation I added a few years ago, driven by the growth in botnet threat delivery mechanisms: make sure penetration testing includes what I call “inside-out” pen testing: having one of your internal PCs access a “captive” malicious site and see if the first stage dropper executable could get on, then see if the second stage (communicate to bot Command and Control sites) and third stage (payload delivery) succeeds. It is pretty scary how often this succeeds – which is why botnet delivery mechanisms are so prominent in advanced targeted threats.

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