Penetration Testing & Forensic Audits

  • Information security breaches are costly, not only financially, but also affect company reputations, customer loyalties, attract negative press, and could trigger significant fines and penalties.
  • It is impossible to safeguard all information, all the time and although organizations have traditionally sought to prevent breaches using security barriers, such as access controls, cryptography, IPS, IDS and firewalls, it is still impossible for these barriers to safeguard all information.
  • New vulnerabilities are discovered daily, and attacks constantly evolve in sophistication and automation.
  • Penetration testing identifies and prioritizes security risks, enabling information security professionals to prioritize remediation efforts and, as a result, organizations can proactively anticipate and prevent unauthorized
    access to valuable information assets

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  • Penetration tests are a great way to identify vulnerabilities that exists in a system or network that has existing security measures in place.
  • A penetration test usually involves the use of attacking methods conducted by trusted individuals that are similarly used by hostile intruders or hackers.
  • Depending on the type of test that is conducted, this may involve a simple scan of an IP addresses to identify machines that are offering services with known vulnerabilities or even exploiting known vulnerabilities that exists in an unpatched operating system.
  • The results of these tests or attacks are then documented and presented as report to the owner of the system and the vulnerabilities identified can then be resolved.
  • Bear in mind that a penetration test does not last forever.
  • Depending on the organization conducting the tests, the time frame to conduct each test varies.
  • A penetration test is basically an attempt to breach the security of a network or system and is not a full security audit.
  • This means that it is no more than a view of a system’s security at a single moment in time.
  • At this time, the known vulnerabilities, weaknesses or mis-configured systems have not changed within the time frame the penetration test is conducted.
  • This is either to increase upper management awareness of security issues or to test intrusion detection and response capabilities. It also helps in assisting the higher management in decision-making processes.
  • The management of an organization might not want to address all the vulnerabilities that are found in a vulnerability assessment but might want to address its system weaknesses that are found through a penetration test. This can happen as addressing all the weaknesses
    that are found in a vulnerability assessment can be costly and most organizations might not be able allocate the budget to do this.
  • Cyber forensics can be defined as the process of extracting information and data from computer storage media and guaranteeing its accuracy and reliability.
  • The challenge of course is actually finding this data, collecting it, preserving it, and presenting it in a manner acceptable in a court of law.
  • Electronic evidence is fragile and can easily be modified. Additionally, cyber thieves, criminals, dishonest and even honest employees hide, wipe, disguise, cloak, encrypt and destroy evidence from storage media using a variety of freeware, shareware and commercially available utility programs.
  • A global dependency on technology combined with the expanding presence of the Internet as a key and strategic resource requires that corporate assets are well protected and safeguarded.
  • When those assets come under attack, or are misused, info-security professionals must be able to gather electronic evidence of such misuse and utilize that evidence to bring to justice those who misuse the technology
  • Customers who have been compromised (hacked) would like to audit their environment to establish how have they been hacked, how deep into the network the hackers got and what information if any has been stolen.
  • Customers would also like a Cyber forensic audit to be conducted so as to preserve certain evidence which would be needed, for use in a Cyber Crime/ White collar crime case.

This is to test the security posture of the environment/company, having the least amount of information possible the penetration tester will try to get as deep into the network as possible documenting loop holes for a full comprehensive report being submitted at the end of the review..

Analyses the security of the clients network, considering the potential for both internal and external attacks.

Customers would like to audit their firewall/packet filter rules to be sure their rules are defined specifically for their environment and they don’t have general default rules which could cripple their security posture.

We can assess issues such as laptop security, home and tele-worker security, VPN security and access to remote servers.

We can verify claims sent to our customers claiming they have security loop holes.

Ensures customers applications/web applications are secure enough to cope with the transactions they are required to undertake.