Hackers Methodology
I recently completed a room on Tryhackme.com about the methods which pen tester should follow to ensure consistency throughout the industry.
The following are the processes to Pen testing:
Reconnaissance
Enumeration/scanning
Gaining Access
Exploitation phase
Privilege Escalation
Covering Tracks
Reporting
Reconnaissance is all about knowing and gathering information about the company's website you want to penetrate into. That's where search tools like google, Wikipedia and others come in handy.
The next step will be scanning, where you will start interacting with the target to attempt finding vulnerabilities using tools like Nmap, Metasploit and the rest of them. The aim of scanning is to determine the target's overall attack surface to determine what the target might be vulnerable to in the Exploitation phase.
After the Exploitation phase, we move on to the Privilege Escalation phase where I try to escalate privilege to a higher user account in order to have control over the machine.
The next phase would be covering your tracks, but since there was an agreement before the penetration test, there will be no need to cover my tracks.
The final step would be to report my findings. Generally, there are 3 types of reports which includes:
Vulnerability scan report
Findings summary
Full format report.
In every report the finding name, finding description, finding criticality and remediation recommendation should be included.
