This case study provides an overview of the operations carried out by our penetration testing red berets for one of our customers.
Executive summary
The objective of the test was to find out the vulnerabilities that can be seen and compromised from an external source and internal corporate network. The penetration test team acted as hackers and followed steps that an expert hacker would take to break into the system
Risk profile
Based on the findings of the penetration test, we profiled the risks of the machines, on the internal network and on the Internet. Machines accessible from the Internet and vulnerable to attack need to be secured on a priority basis. Machines accessible from the corporate network house critical information, and those that are vulnerable to exploits need to be hardened.
Machine name
Denial of service
Information stealing
Control over machine
Silver Bullet
Solaris
DC
Desctops
External Firewall
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Impact
The vulnerabilities in the company result primarily in three threats. Two machines are vulnerable to a 'denial of service', including the scanning server. Data can be stolen from these servers and complete control over the system can be had.
These are some of the key findings:
Silver Bullet
Favorable technical skills — rich experience with financial-services applications and outstanding credentials in penetration testing
Favorable personality traits — ability to think creatively and laterally; tenacity and patience
Solaris
Malicious users from the Internet take control of the server remotely and access other systems on the internal network. This risk is due to un-patched services.
DC
Once the Silver Bullet system has been compromised, it can be used to compromise the DC, which is also running vulnerable versions of a few services. This risk is due to un-patched services.
Desktops
Once the DC system has been compromised, it can be used to access any of the desktops within the network. These can be used as agents for launching a DDOS attack on any external target. A worm or Trojan can be spread easily and it can affect almost all corporate machines.
