What is Infrastructure Penetration Testing?

‍Penetration testing is one of the most effective ways to thoroughly analyze your data security posture, accounting for vulnerabilities, potential threat vectors, and mimicking attacker behavior. And, infrastructure penetration testing is one of the most thorough varieties.

Infrastructure penetration testing is ethical, controlled hacking of a company’s entire software and hardware setup. It’s a process designed to thoroughly test a company’s protection against potential hacking and/or internal threats.

In this guide, we’ll take you through what infrastructure pen testing entails, why it’s important, and the typical steps covered during the process.

What is Infrastructure Penetration Testing?

Infrastructure penetration testing is a thorough, controlled exploration and hack of a company’s internal computers, connections, and associated devices.

That means an infrastructure pen test typically attacks:

• Internal or in-office computers and devices
• Hard drives and external storage
• Servers (on-site and in the cloud)
• Networking (including intranet connections and, occasionally, IoT devices)

Compared to other types of penetration testing, infrastructure pen tests typically focus on the physical aspects of an enterprise’s setup. That means, in some cases, further testing on wireless security and connectivity, and cloud setup, might take place separately.

Benefits of Infrastructure Penetration Testing

Through infrastructure pen testing, you can:

• Learn more about how your external and internal networks and systems look to hackers
• Uncover hidden flaws that might have escaped knowledge
• Confidently secure your infrastructure against external and internal threats
• Save money by avoiding loss of business and reputation through data breaches
• Discover misconfigurations in firewall settings, network connections, and software
• Understand what hackers look for and how they manipulate your infrastructure to steal data
• Explore connections between devices and learn more about known weaknesses and exploits
• Set up robust security protections with professional advice and recommendations

The major overall benefit of professional infrastructure testing is that you have in-depth insight into how secure your operation truly is. It’s not always easy to confidently say you are fully protected – which is why our clients rely on our penetration testing services to develop action plans.

Infrastructure Penetration Testing Steps

In our experience, no two infrastructure pen tests ever look the same. Client needs and setups will always vary, meaning there will be unique challenges to work with. However, most infrastructure tests follow a standard five-step approach as follows.

Pre-Engagement Planning

Pre-engagement planning is all about getting to know the end client, the systems involved in infrastructure, and what said client wants to achieve through penetration testing.

At this stage, our team typically draws up an action plan with clients to establish boundaries and to set expectations. For example, a client might request that we solely attack the internal side of their systems.

During the planning phase, an infrastructure pen test might use specific tools and services to map out architectures and identify potential entry points – following popular penetration testing methodologies like OWASP, PTES, or NIST.

Pre-engagement planning helps our testers understand the scope and extent of a project, making it easier for us to move ahead with reconnaissance and scanning.

Reconnaissance

At the second stage of the process, testers thoroughly research systems and business practices that make up the infrastructure they are to attack and report on.

That means digging deep into network maps and learning more about business goals and everyday activities. Reconnaissance is important so that testers know where to attack as a priority, and so they gain a clearer picture of where weakness may lie.

Even at this stage, testers use a variety of professional tools to explore infrastructures and to carefully plan ahead.

Scanning and Vulnerability Assessment

The third stage sees testers running scanning tools and techniques across the map they’ve built. They do this to find potential weaknesses and flaws where attackers might typically strike to leak data from.

The breadth of this assessment can vary depending on the testing methodology used, and whether it is a black, gray, or white box project.

Black box penetration testing, for example, is a blind process that mimics hackers who have no prior knowledge of systems.

White box penetration system, which VikingCloud widely adopts, gives testers explicit knowledge of an infrastructure, allowing them to scan far and wide.

Gray box testing offers a middle ground, combining selective system insights with an external attacker’s mindset to uncover risks.

After pulling vulnerability data through scanning, testers can then prepare appropriate tools and actions to exploit and pull data.

Exploitation

The fourth stage of infrastructure pen testing is where testers get to actively hack and explore systems using typical professional tools.

During this process, testers gain access to infrastructure systems and assets, record concerns regarding ease of break-in, and explore how much damage they could do once inside.

Clients are reassured that this stage is completely controlled, and that any sensitive data that might be exposed during this process is redacted.

During exploitation, testers may also “sit” and measure how long they can remain behind the scenes and to what extent they can harvest sensitive data. This is another crucial element that will arise in the report.

Reporting and Remediation

The very end of infrastructure penetration testing is the report stage. At this point in the process, testers build a complete report of findings and explain, in plain language, the steps they took to attack and pull sensitive data through system and network vulnerabilities.

It’s also here where testers will help clients build a forward-looking action plan to make their security measures more robust against evolving threats. They might develop a report with proof of what they could access, but again, they will make redactions.

Remediation typically recommended at the report stage might include ensuring regular software and hardware updates, changing how data is stored (e.g., off-site), and training personnel on threat trends and the latest security practices.

Naturally, remediation steps will vary depending on the client and what is discovered – therefore, this is one of the most flexible stages in infrastructure testing.

Types of Infrastructure Penetration Testing

As mentioned earlier, there are different niche types of penetration testing in specific areas, depending on the client’s needs.

Typically, we split these testing types into two categories, determined by where an attacker is likely to come from:

• Internal penetration testing analyzes how at-risk a company is of being hacked or manipulated by people within an organization.
• External penetration testing explores to what extent an infrastructure might be at risk from outside attackers.

An internal penetration test might involve testing physical computers, servers, and data storage at the client’s premises, and how it is all connected. That can mean going deep into specific software and hardware as the client requires.

This type of infrastructure testing analyzes how likely and how easy it is for bad actors within a company to attack their own systems using gaps in the infrastructure. Unfortunately, it’s thought that internal attackers account for 35% of all data breaches.

An external penetration test, meanwhile, can include analyzing hardware or software that attackers could exploit to gain access and harvest data once inside.

Typical hardware that might be considered during these tests include firewalls and public-facing security measures, password protection and multi-factor authentication.

Crucially, an external infrastructure pen test will assess how effective a company’s “perimeter” is against outside attackers, and report back on what could be done to strengthen it.

Regardless, both routes look carefully at security risks and weaknesses that might be present in a company’s infrastructure, and how an attacker may be able to take advantage of them.

Conclusion

Infrastructure penetration testing covers some of the most comprehensive security assessments available to companies protecting sensitive data. It considers the whole of a company’s hardware and software connectivity.

Penetration testing infrastructures makes all the difference to business owners who are worried about how secure they are in the face of unknown threats. This type of testing could, for example, save them loss of reputation and revenue in the long run.

If you’re considering infrastructure pen testing and would like to know more about what the processes involve, be sure to contact our team for more details and let’s set up a conversation.