Penetration Studies - A Technical Overview

This paper builds on Jessica Lowery's research paper, Penetration Testing: The Third Party Hacker, by drilling down on some of the most common tools and applications used to perform penetration tests. Penetration tests can be performed externally and/or internally. This paper takes the position of an unauthorized external user with no specific knowledge of the target network other then what is available via public information and what the malicious user can glean from the output of his tools and applications. This paper will utilize tools that are freely available to any user on the Internet, with the majority of them on the Unix platform. This paper will stop at identifying potential vulnerabilities, although some penetration studies may involve the security engineer attempting unauthorized access or to exercise the potential exploit. This paper is divided into two parts: 'Tools of the Trade' that identifies various tools for penetration testing and the second part is the technical breakdown and 'how-to' of reconnaissance scanning and vulnerability testing.