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Showing posts from December, 2012

Pentests Don't Make You Secure

I was asked to provide details of the 'Penetration Testing Phase' for a particular project by someone who was putting together a Test Approach Document today. The categories I was asked to fill in were: Objective of the phase Responsibility & Authority Dependencies, risks & assumptions Entry & Exit criteria When discussing what they really wanted it became clear that they didn't know what a penetration test was or why we do them. The questions and document were set up expecting a deliverable from the pentest itself. The report was being treated as the deliverable without any thought of why a report was being produced or how it will be used. It was a tick in the box - "We require a pentest to be able to go live, so if we've had the report we can tick that box and move on." Pentesting is not an end in itself. Pentesting is a standard, finite snapshot of the security of a system, which, if taken in isolation as a goal, is fairly useless. Pent