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Improved defense through pen testing
Black Hat, White Hat
Cybersecurity professionals often call the steps taken by pen testers the "hacker lifecycle." In a previous article [1], I outlined the pen test discovery process. In this article, I focus on the typical steps that pen testers undertake to automate and orchestrate attacks (Figure 1). In a future article, I will show how each of these steps can be detected by a good security analyst with the right tools.
Figure 1: Typical steps in the hacker lifecycle.
Although more than a single hacker lifecycle exists, Figure 1 shows many of the steps that most attackers will take when compromising a resource in the cloud – or even in a traditional network. I've seen quite a few useful pen testing/hacker lifecycle models, and although none are perfect, two of the more popular models are the Cyber Kill Chain© (copyright Lockheed Martin) [2] and the MITRE ATT&CKTM model [3].
Rather than say that all models have their strengths and weaknesses, I would argue that a good pen tester will customize and alter basic steps along the way according to the nature of the organization being tested. The main steps will be similar; however,
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