Security vulnerabilities, such as weak configurations, unpatched systems, and botched architectures, continue to plague organizations. Enterprises need people who can find these flaws in a professional manner to help eradicate them from our infrastructures. Lots of people claim to have penetration testing, ethical hacking, and security assessment skills, but precious few can apply these skills in a methodical regimen of professional testing to help make an organization more secure. This class covers the ingredients for successful network penetration testing to help attendees improve their enterprise's security stance.

We address detailed pre-test planning, including setting up an effective penetration testing infrastructure and establishing ground rules with the target organization to avoid surprises and misunderstanding. Then, we discuss a time-tested methodology for penetration and ethical hacking across the network, evaluating the security of network services and the operating systems behind them.

Attendees will learn how to perform detailed reconnaissance, learning about a target's infrastructure by mining blogs, search engines, and social networking sites. We'll then turn our attention to scanning, experimenting with numerous tools in hands-on exercises. Our exploitation phase will include the use of exploitation frameworks, stand-alone exploits, and other valuable tactics, all with hands-on exercises in our lab environment. The class also discusses how to prepare a final report, tailored to maximize the value of the test from both a management and technical perspective. The final portion of the class includes a comprehensive hands-on exercise, conducting a penetration test against a hypothetical target organization, following all of the steps.

The course also describes the limitations of penetration testing techniques and other practices that can be used to augment penetration testing to find vulnerabilities in architecture, policies, and processes. We also address how penetration testing should be integrated as a piece of a comprehensive enterprise information security program.

More info: http://www.sans.org/security-training/network-penetration-testing-ethical-hacking-937-mid