Penetration Testing Execution Standard

Penetration Testing Execution Standard
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Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES)
Difficulty Level :
Medium Last Updated :
25 Oct, 2019
Software Testing | Penetration Testing
Software Testing - White Box Penetration Testing
Penetration Testing and Reverse Engineering
Reconnaissance | Penetration Testing
Differences between Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Assessments
Difference between End-to-end Testing and Unit Testing
Software Engineering | Differences between Sanity Testing and Smoke Testing
Difference between Frontend Testing and Backend Testing
Software Testing | Accessibility Testing
Difference between Regression Testing and Development Testing
Software Testing | Non-functional Testing
Sandwich Testing | Software Testing
Software Engineering | Comparison between Regression Testing and Re-Testing
Graphical User Interface Testing (GUI) Testing
Software Testing | Reliability Testing
Software Testing | Scenario Testing
Software Testing | Functional Testing
Software Testing | Use Case Testing
Software Testing | Configuration Testing
Software Testing | Portability Testing
Differences between White Box Testing and Gray Box Testing
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Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) is a penetration testing method.It was developed by a team of information security practitioners with the aim of addressing the need for a complete and up-to-date standard in penetration testing. In addition to guiding security professionals, it also attempts to inform businesses with what they should expect from a penetration test and guide them in scoping and negotiating successful projects.
PTES Process: PTES describes the penetration test in seven main sections:
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Penetration testing requires a special mindset and typically attracts some of the best and brightest in the world of cybersecurity. There are many useful certifications designed to help teach penetration testing, including:
But despite the number of certifications and the number of people in the pipeline to earn them, there remains a massive skill gap. In 2017, technology recruiting firm Mondo reported to Tech Republic that penetration testers were one of the three most in-demand cybersecurity job listings on their roster.
There’s also the fact that it’s hard to train a good penetration tester. The position demands inventiveness and initiative, an insatiable curiosity about how things work and a desire to solve puzzles. This is the very thing that drives a pen tester to make the same intuitive leaps a black hat hacker might.
But those individuals are rare, and the demand for testers is massive.
In this environment, some information security consultants and executives decided that providing a comprehensive and standardized guide to inform penetration testing engagements and help instruct penetration testers would be valuable.
In 2009, the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) was started as the brainchild of six information security consultants attempting to address deficiencies in the penetration testing community.
Their goal was to create a standard that would help both clients and testers by providing guidance about the tools, techniques, and elements to be covered in a general penetration test.
[[[We are aiming to create an actual standard so that businesses can have a baseline of what is needed when they get a pentest as well as an understanding of what type of testing they require or would provide value to their business. The lack of standardization now is only hurting the industry as businesses are getting low-quality work done, and practitioners lack guidance in terms of what is needed to provide quality service.]]]
With demands in the market exploding, many low-quality or unqualified firms and individuals were getting in on the penetration testing gold rush and delivering inadequate or even downright dangerous results that were giving even legitimate providers a bad name. Some penetration testers used their access to systems to subsequently hack the same targets they’d been paid to help secure . Others inadvertently damaged servers or left behind tools that could be used by malicious hackers making real attacks .
If certain standards could be agreed on, it was felt that the bad providers would either drop out or be more clearly distinguished from professional testers.
PTES wasn’t the first attempt at exploring a set of instructions and tools for penetration testers and other standards have been developed subsequently, including:
The PTES was a far more comprehensive effort than any of the competing standards, however. The guidelines are broken down into six sections:
There are also five appendices for further reference.
Each section offers an in-depth discussion of the factors a professional penetration tester should consider during that particular phase of an engagement. It covers everything from RF-frequency monitoring to physical site surveillance to mining and researching targets for phishing or other social engineering attacks.
More importantly, it explains how to interpret some of the results that can be uncovered and how to work toward exploiting vulnerabilities found.
The document contains links to resources and tools that can be used in each phase as well. For instance, helpful links to state business registration search sites are included for performing background research on the target.
But the document verges at times into overly generic suggestion and links that verge on pure cruft… right after the state corporation search links, for example, the document links the major search engines—Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the like—as if even five-year-olds today didn’t have such resources hardwired into their brains.
There are also considerable gaps in the information available. Much of the exploitation section awaits expansion, although general techniques are outlined. Some specific attacks are laid out, but the details are often dated and of limited utility.
The biggest problem with the PTES, or any static standard with such fine detail, is that information technology evolves too rapidly to be easily cataloged in a truly comprehensive manner.
Making matters worse, hacking itself, or at least the sort of hacking that penetration testers can most legitimately claim to defend against, is necessarily at the bleeding edge of technology. Exploits which are old and well-understood can and usually do have automated scanning and detection tools to ferret them out. The skill and inventiveness of an ethical hacker is put to best use when applied to find exactly the sorts of vulnerabilities these tools can’t uncover.
Cybersecurity, however, is a field that perpetually exists in a state of compromise and bare adequacy. Considering that skilled and qualified penetration testers simply cannot be produced in the volumes necessary to keep up with current demand, PTES and other efforts toward developing pen testing standards may be the best available compromise.
One thing that the standard can help all testers with, though, is ensuring that they have at least considered most of the common bases of attack in every engagement. Although the kind of magic that results in genuine insight during penetration testing evaluations may be rare, most of the work is meat-and-potatoes scanning and reporting. Although this can be automated—and often is—it’s still the case that many organizations don’t do it internally and rely on penetration testers to handle routine scans.
Even with its flaws, PTES outlines some of the industry best practices that should, at a minimum, be followed in any penetration testing engagement and it remains one of the best guides of its kind available today.

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Fork Disclaimer : Note that this is an unofficial fork, the goal for which is to experiment with an alternative platform for the standard. The official PTES can be located at http://pentest-standard.org/ .
The penetration testing execution standard consists of seven (7) main
sections. These cover everything related to a penetration test - from
the initial communication and reasoning behind a pentest, through the
intelligence gathering and threat modeling phases where testers are
working behind the scenes in order to get a better understanding of the
tested organization, through vulnerability research, exploitation and
post exploitation, where the technical security expertise of the testers
come to play and combine with the business understanding of the
engagement, and finally to the reporting, which captures the entire
process, in a manner that makes sense to the customer and provides the
most value to it.
This version can be considered a v1.0 as the core elements of the
standard are solidified, and have been “road tested” for over a year
through the industry. A v2.0 is in the works soon, and will provide more
granular work in terms of “levels” - as in intensity levels at which
each of the elements of a penetration test can be performed at. As no
pentest is like another, and testing will range from the more mundane
web application or network test, to a full-on red team engagement, said
levels will enable an organization to define how much sophistication
they expect their adversary to exhibit, and enable the tester to step up
the intensity on those areas where the organization needs them the most.
Some of the initial work on “levels” can be seen in the intelligence
gathering section.
Following are the main sections defined by the standard as the basis for
penetration testing execution:
As the standard does not provide any technical guidelines as far as how
to execute an actual pentest, we have also created a technical guide to
accompany the standard itself. The technical gude can be reached via the
link below:
For more information on what this standard is, please visit:

© Copyright 2016, The PTES Team

Revision 48d01db0 .

Exploitation
After finding the vulnerabilities, we try to exploit those vulnerabilities to breach the system and its security. For the Exploitation we use different framework and software that are recommended for exploitative purpose and are freely available. Some of the most recommended tools include:

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Cybercriminals are targeting personal and corporate information by using different attacking vectors. The main reason behind their success is the lack of efficient policies and standards. That allows them to exploit the system and steal the information. To prevent the attackers, some tough protocols were developed previously that are somehow working effectively and preventing many attackers, but rapid change in the attacks has also bypassed this wall. The researchers are working hard to develop more effective ways to prevent attackers. The Successful standards for security are discussed below to give an idea how information security is achieved:

Learn the tools and techniques used by cybercriminals to perform a white-hat, ethical hack on your organization.
The penetration testing execution standard covers everything related to a penetration test. From the initial communication, information gathering it also covers threat modeling phases where testers are working behind the scenes to get a better understanding of the tested organization, through vulnerability research, exploitation and post-exploitation.
The penetration testing execution standard consists of seven phases:
PTES defines a baseline for the minimum that is required for a basic pentest, as well as several advanced scenarios that provide more comprehensive activities required for organizations with higher security needs.
In this phase, we prepare and gather the required tools, OS, and software to start the penetration testing. Whereas selecting the tools required during a penetration test depends on several factors such as the type and the depth of the engagement.
There are some common and basic tools that are compulsory to complete penetration testing with the expected results, include:

VMware enables us to run multiple instances of the operating system on a single workstation.
As Linux is the most recommended OS for penetration testing, mostly penetration testing is carried on Linux based system.
Windows XP/7 is required for certain tools to be used. Many commercial tools or Microsoft-specific network assessment and penetration tools are available that run cleanly on the platform.
An 802.11 USB adapter allows the easy connection of a wireless adapter to the penetration testing system. The 802.11 USB adapter is recommended as other don’t support the required functions.
A spectrum analyzer is a device used to examine the spectral composition of some electrical or optical waveform. A spectrum analyzer is used to determine whether or not a wireless transmitter is working according to defined standards.
The software requirements are based upon the engagement scope. However, some commercial and open source software that could be required to conduct a full penetration test properly are listed below:
Intelligence gathering
In this phase, the information or data or intelligence is gathered to assist in guiding the assessment actions. The information gathering process is conducted to gather information about the employee in an organization that can help us to get access, potentially secret or private “intelligence” of a competitor, or information that is otherwise relevant to the target.
Threat modeling
Threat modeling is a process for optimizing network security by identifying vulnerabilities and then defining countermeasures to prevent, or mitigate the effects of threats to the system. The threat modeling is used to determine where the most effort should be applied to keep a system secure. This is a factor that changes as applications are added, removed, or upgraded or user requirements are evolved.
Vulnerability analysis
Vulnerability Analysis is used to identify and evaluate the security risks posed by identified vulnerabilities. The Process of vulnerability is divided into two steps, Identification and Validation.
Post-Exploitation
In the Post-exploitation phase, we determine the value of the machine compromised and to maintain control of the machine for later use. The value of the machine is determined by the sensitivity of the data stored on it and the machine’s usefulness in further compromising the network.
Reporting
In this phase, we report the findings in a way that is understandable and acceptable by the organization that owns that system or hardware. It includes the defects that allow an attacker to violate an explicit (or implicit) security policy to achieve some impact (or consequence). In particular, defects that allow intruders to gain increased levels of access or interfere with the normal operation of systems are vulnerabilities.
There are different types of reporting that depends on the genre of authority to which we are reporting.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an open community dedicated to finding and fighting the causes of insecure software. OWASP is a new type of entity in the security market that provides free tools and documentations to anyone in improving application security.
OWASP is dedicated to enabling organizations to conceive, develop, acquire, operate, and maintain applications that can be trusted. OWASP is not affiliated with any technology company, although it supports the informed use of security technology.
OWASP provides different licenses for the use, modification, and distribution of OWASP materials. Anyone can use this for strengthening the application security.
Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual (OSSTMM) is a peer-reviewed manual of security testing and analysis which result in verified facts. These facts provide actionable information that can measurably improve operational security. OSTMM helps us to know and measure that how well security works.
By using the OSSTMM, you no longer have to rely on general best practices because you will have verified information specific to your needs on which to base your security decisions.
OSSTMM is written for both the Internet security developers and testers. Networking professionals may also find this manual useful, while this manual is not intended to prepare you to use a particular software or network protocols or how to read the results.
This manual is also useful for developers that will help them in building better networks, firewalls, applications, and testing tools.
A security test is consisting of two different types of attacks.
The process in any security test can be broken down into the following:
Visibility is what can be seen on your Internet presence. This includes, but is not limited to, open or filtered ports, systems, the architecture, applications, email addresses, employee names, the software products and the websites visited by employees and everything downloaded. In other words, visibility can also be referred as leaving footprints.
Access can be defined as what users are allowed to read or retrieve. This includes, but is not limited to a web page, server, streaming video, or anything that serves as a service or application where a computer interacts with another computer within your network. In the world of technology where security is highly concerned, access level defines the boundary to access the system.
Trust can be defined as the level of authentication, non-repudiation, data integrity, access control, accountability and data integrity. This includes, but is not limited to VPNs, PKIs, HTTP
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