Network Penetration Testing: Taming The Firewall Ethically

Information technology is now an essential part of every industry. Regardless of the geographical location, information is easily accessible across organizations. Therefore, security of data is crucial in a techno savvy professional environment. Security Testing Services are crucial as Ethical hacking techniques, such as penetration testing, are being adopted by organizations for assessing the effectiveness of security measures employed by them.

Penetration testing is an important procedure to understand and overcome many challenges in an organization's information security program. It is about mitigating risk to improve reliability of an organizational network, while also enhancing the level and scope of its security. We have an indigenous perspective about penetration testing: "Thinking beyond what a hacker/cracker thinks." At a high-level, the penetration tester should begin to think like a criminal to stop malicious activities.

The key areas of a penetration tester's expertise at QA InfoTech are: network penetration, walk-through, web, wireless, phone network, dumpster, physical security testing, and social engineering. The IT world holds many promises that boost the use of network penetration testing. Our network penetration testing team presents the highest quality of service; not only do we evaluate the security of an organizational network from real-time threats like cyber warfare; we also recognize the alternatives to beat it.

We replicate all such possible scenarios that network administrators have to think through, in order to protect their server. While testing, we place a number of network devices in safe zones like routers, firewalls and switches which help us create real life scenarios. Since a firewall works as a buffer between two networks, working with the firewall is a major concern for a penetration tester. Therefore, while performing penetration tests at QA InfoTech, the penetration testing team adheres to the following points:

1. In order to figure out open and filtered ports, we use ACK scan, a tool that operates by sending a TCP ACK frame to a remote port
2. Unfiltered ports are then attacked using tools such as Firewalking
3. We can upload files or launch attacks by tunneling traffic through open ports. Tunneling methods like Loki ICMP Tunneling, ACK tunneling and HTTP tunneling are used for bypassing the firewall
4. During tunneling, we have to use all available techniques to get around the firewall, undetected
a) Many administrators usually keep ICMP enabled on their firewall and use tools such as ping and trace-out; however, since ICMP can be utilized for attacks, it should be disabled to avoid such occurrences
b) If ICMP is blocked on a firewall, do not assume that the firewall is safe from attacks. A penetration tester can also attempt ACK tunneling

So, the question of this hour is - Is it sane to compromise your highly secure and confidential data? We think that it"s not! As a part of effective security testing services we believe in highest level of network penetration, one should be aptly equipped to ensure that a well-crafted network penetration test provides an exact real-world scenario of the risk posed. We dare to think beyond that risk, and that too, with elevated risk solving abilities of our security test experts.