Pentesting and Active Defense
Pentest+, CEH, OSCP
Hunting vs Pentesting
Threat hunting
Less disruptive, “look but don’t touch”
Based on observation, analysis
Shortens detection time for threats
Pentesting
“Let’s see how we could be attacked”
A process to identify vulnerabilities
Actively attempts to break security
Disruptive
Provides an “outside” perspective on security (attacker’s PoV)
Purpose is to identify vulnerabilities
Rules of engagement
Authorization is a must!
Time-bound: When? How long?
Scope: What? (don’t give in to “scope creep”)
Are you in the right country?
Type: web, WLAN, social engineering, etc
Tools and techniques
White/Grey/Black box?
Engage staff or not?
Reporting
Wargames – a “team” exercise
Red team – pentesters
Blue team – incident responders
White team – Control the game
Purple team – Ensure communication between red and blue
Active Defense
Decoy tactics – throw off the attackers. Nonstandard ports/user accounts/obfuscation.
Honeypots/Honeynets
OpenCanary
Annoyance tactics
Counterattacks
Blacklist / Blocklist approach
Specify what is not allowed
Can be used during incident response
Careful with excessive blocking
Careful with too little blocking.
Whitelist approach
Specify what is allowed
Can also be used during incident response
Requires more admin work
Execution control
Part of endpoint protection solutions
Allow/deny installation and execution of software
Can either be blocklist or whitelist
Examples: software restriction policies (group policy), AppLocker, Windows Defender Application Control
Linux: AppArmor, SELinux
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