Revolutionizing Penetration Testing Efficiency with ThreatNG's Security Ratings
Penetration testing is a vital part of any effective cybersecurity strategy. However, traditional methods often involve time-consuming processes that can deplete resources and delay results. ThreatNG tackles these challenges directly by offering security ratings and capabilities that significantly boost the efficiency and productivity of penetration testers. This allows testers to focus on high-impact activities, ultimately conserving time, money, and resources for the testing team and the organization assessed.
From Time-Consuming Tasks to Focused Analysis: A Deep Dive
Traditionally, penetration testers spend a significant portion of their time on essential yet often tedious preliminary tasks. These tasks establish the foundation for effective testing but can take up valuable time and resources that might be better used for actual security analysis and exploitation. Let's outline these time-consuming tasks:
Attack Surface Discovery: This involves identifying and mapping an organization's assets exposed to the Internet.
This can include:
Discovering all domain names and subdomains associated with the organization.
Identifying web applications and their various entry points.
Mapping network infrastructure and exposed services.
Cataloging cloud-based assets and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications in use.
Traditionally, this process has been largely manual, involving network scanners, subdomain enumeration tools, and manual web crawling. It is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors or omissions.
Vulnerability Identification: Before exploitation occurs, penetration testers must identify potential weaknesses in the organization's security posture.
This involves:
Scanning for known vulnerabilities in web applications, network services, and systems.
Analyzing configurations for security weaknesses.
Reviewing code for potential flaws.
This stage usually involves automated scanning tools and manual analysis, which require substantial time and expertise.
Initial Reconnaissance: This is the information-gathering phase, where penetration testers collect data about the organization to inform their testing strategy.
This can involve:
Gathering intelligence from open-source sources (OSINT).
Analyzing DNS records and WHOIS information.
Investigating social media presence.
Explore the dark web for potentially compromised credentials or leaked information.
Reconnaissance is essential for understanding the target organization, but manual OSINT gathering and analysis can be time-consuming and may not provide comprehensive results.
How ThreatNG Transforms This Process
ThreatNG automates and streamlines these traditionally time-consuming processes, fundamentally transforming how penetration testers work.
Rather than spending days or weeks on attack surface discovery, ThreatNG offers immediate insight into an organization's external footprint.
Instead of manually scanning for every possible vulnerability, ThreatNG's security ratings emphasize the most critical risk areas.
Rather than tedious OSINT collection, ThreatNG's intelligence repositories and investigation modules provide relevant information directly to the tester.
By automating and streamlining these initial tasks, ThreatNG enables penetration testers to redirect their attention toward:
In-depth Analysis: Testers can spend more time analyzing the vulnerabilities and risks highlighted by ThreatNG, allowing for a deeper understanding of their potential impact.
Exploitation: With the groundwork established by ThreatNG, testers can focus on developing and executing advanced exploitation techniques to demonstrate the vulnerabilities' real-world impact.
This ultimately leads to more efficient, effective, and impactful penetration testing.
Detailed Examples of How ThreatNG Enhances Efficiency
Here's an in-depth look at how ThreatNG's security ratings empower penetration testers to be more efficient and productive:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility
The assessment evaluates the likelihood of attackers gaining unauthorized control over web applications. Factors considered include insecure authentication mechanisms, vulnerabilities that allow malicious script injections (XSS), and other weaknesses within the application's external attack surface. By analyzing the web application components accessible from the outside world, potential entry points for attackers can be identified.
Efficiency Gain: Instead of manual web page crawling and analysis, ThreatNG pinpoints potential entry points for attacks like session hijacking or XSS.
Example: ThreatNG identifies a web application with an insecure authentication mechanism and highlights a vulnerability that allows malicious scripts to be injected. The penetration tester can immediately focus on exploiting these vulnerabilities to take over user accounts or demonstrate the impact of XSS rather than spending hours mapping the application's authentication flow or manually searching for input fields.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility
This rating evaluates the likelihood of attackers gaining control over an organization's subdomains. It carefully investigates the website's subdomains, DNS records, SSL certificate statuses, and other relevant information factors.
Efficiency Gain: ThreatNG automates the identification of subdomains vulnerable to takeover, removing the need for manual DNS record analysis.
Example: ThreatNG identifies a subdomain with a DNS record that points to a non-existent cloud service or detects misconfigured DNS records. The penetration tester can swiftly claim that subdomain and demonstrate the potential impact of a takeover or concentrate on exploiting the misconfiguration rather than enumerating subdomains and checking their DNS records individually.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility
This rating evaluates an organization's vulnerability to Business Email Compromise (BEC) and phishing attacks. It is derived from factors like sentiment and financial findings, domain intelligence (including domain name permutations, taken and available Web3 domains, and email intelligence for security presence and format prediction), and dark web presence (compromised credentials).
Efficiency Gain: ThreatNG provides insights into an organization's susceptibility to BEC and phishing, enabling testers to prioritize their social engineering efforts.
Example: ThreatNG shows that an organization has numerous executives with publicly available email addresses, detects negative sentiment or financial challenges, or uncovers compromised credentials on the dark web. Instead of launching generic phishing campaigns or starting from square one, the penetration tester can concentrate on crafting targeted phishing emails, creating persuasive phishing lures that exploit employee concerns, or attempting account takeovers using compromised credentials.
Brand Damage Susceptibility
This rating assesses the potential for events to impact an organization's reputation negatively. It is derived from attack surface intelligence, digital risk intelligence, ESG violations, sentiment and financials (lawsuits, SEC filings, SEC Form 8-Ks, and negative news), and domain intelligence (domain name permutations and available/taken Web3 domains).
Efficiency Gain: ThreatNG helps penetration testers quickly identify factors that could contribute to brand damage, allowing them to focus on security weaknesses that pose the most significant risk to the organization's reputation.
Example: ThreatNG uncovers negative news articles regarding the organization's security practices, identifies potential ESG violations, or reveals that the organization has fallen victim to a successful cyberattack. Rather than merely searching for vulnerabilities, the penetration tester can focus on identifying vulnerabilities that could be exploited to harm the organization’s reputation, vulnerabilities that might worsen ESG violations, or vulnerabilities that could enable additional attacks.
Data Leak Susceptibility
This rating assesses the likelihood of sensitive information being exposed. It is derived from external attack surface and digital risk intelligence that considers factors such as cloud and SaaS exposure, dark web presence (including compromised credentials), domain intelligence, sentiment, and financial aspects (lawsuits and SEC Form 8-Ks).
Efficiency Gain: ThreatNG helps testers pinpoint potential data leakage points, allowing them to focus on preventing data breaches.
Example: Misconfigured cloud storage services that expose sensitive data are identified, along with mentions of the organization on dark web forums discussing data leaks and vulnerabilities in web applications that could enable attackers to steal data. The penetration tester can quickly attempt to access and exfiltrate data, investigate dark web leads, or concentrate on exploiting web application vulnerabilities to retrieve sensitive information instead of searching for potential data leaks.
Cyber Risk Exposure
This rating can assess an organization's overall cyber risk. It considers parameters from the Domain Intelligence module, including certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, and sensitive ports. Additionally, the rating gauges the exposure of code secrets by identifying code repositories, assessing their exposure levels, and examining the contents for sensitive data. It also evaluates cloud services and SaaS solutions for potential exposure while checking for compromised credentials on the dark web.
Efficiency Gain: ThreatNG provides a comprehensive view of the organization's overall cyber risk, enabling testers to identify key weakness areas and prioritize their efforts.
Example: Many identified sensitive ports, known vulnerabilities, exposed code repositories that contain sensitive data, misconfigured cloud services, and compromised credentials. The penetration tester can prioritize evaluating these high-risk areas, reviewing code repositories for vulnerabilities and sensitive information, or exploiting weaknesses to access the organization's systems, rather than spending time on less critical systems or manually searching for code repositories.
ESG Exposure
The evaluation gauges an organization's vulnerability to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks. It draws upon external attack surface data, digital risk intelligence, sentiment analysis, and financial findings. The assessment covers various aspects, including competition, consumer issues, employment, environmental concerns, financial matters, government contracting, healthcare, and safety-related factors.
Efficiency Gain: ThreatNG helps testers identify potential ESG-related risks, allowing them to efficiently assess the organization's exposure to these issues.
Example: Negative news articles about the organization's environmental practices, potential labor violations, human rights concerns, and issues related to corporate governance have been identified. Rather than performing a general vulnerability scan, the penetration tester can identify vulnerabilities that could lead to ecological damage or negative publicity, systems or data that may expose labor violations, or weaknesses that could compromise financial data.
Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure
This rating assesses potential risks associated with an organization's supply chain and third-party relationships. It is derived from domain intelligence (enumerating vendor technologies from DNS and subdomains), technology stack, and cloud and SaaS exposure.
Efficiency Gain: ThreatNG helps testers identify potential risks related to supply chains and third parties, enabling a more focused assessment.
Example: A key vendor has a history of security breaches, highlighting vulnerabilities in third-party software and services, which may indicate that a third party has access to sensitive data. This information allows the penetration tester to prioritize efforts by assessing systems or data shared with that vendor. They can exploit vulnerabilities in third-party software or evaluate the third party's security practices and the potential impact of a compromise rather than spreading their assessment across all third-party connections or software.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility
An organization's vulnerability to data breaches and ransomware attacks is evaluated through a comprehensive rating. This evaluation is based on various sources of external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, including domain intelligence—such as exposed sensitive ports, private IPs, and known vulnerabilities—dark web presence related to compromised credentials and ransomware incidents along with gang activities, and sentiment and financials tracked through SEC Form 8-Ks. Additionally, ThreatNG monitors over 70 ransomware gangs.
Efficiency Gain: ThreatNG helps testers quickly assess an organization's susceptibility to breaches and ransomware, allowing for a more targeted approach.
Example: Exposed sensitive ports and known vulnerabilities have been uncovered, along with evidence showing that the organization is targeted by ransomware groups on the dark web. Additionally, negative financial indicators may imply a higher likelihood of the organization paying a ransom. The penetration tester can prioritize exploiting these vulnerabilities to gain initial access, identify vulnerabilities that ransomware groups could exploit, or factor financial indicators into the risk assessment rather than conducting a general vulnerability scan.
Mobile App Exposure
The evaluation of an organization’s mobile apps involves discovering the apps in marketplaces and analyzing their contents for access credentials, security credentials, and platform-specific identifiers.
Efficiency Gain: ThreatNG streamlines discovering and assessing mobile applications.
Example: Mobile apps may include exposed API keys or access tokens, insecure data storage, and hardcoded credentials. The penetration tester can promptly use these exposed keys to access backend systems, exploit insecure data storage to reveal sensitive data, or employ hardcoded credentials for unauthorized access instead of decompiling the app and searching for credentials or analyzing data storage methods.
ThreatNG's Force Multiplier Effect
ThreatNG acts as a force multiplier for penetration testing teams by:
Automating Reconnaissance: Automates external discovery, domain intelligence gathering, and dark web monitoring.
Providing Contextual Intelligence: Delivers security ratings and threat intelligence that helps testers prioritize their efforts.
Streamlining Workflows: Offers reporting and collaboration features that enhance team productivity.
This enables penetration testers to achieve more comprehensive results in less time, with greater accuracy and a stronger focus on delivering actionable security insights.