Why Penetration Testing is Important to Security Trainers
The challenge:
Finding the best method for illustrating penetration testing processes and best practices to experienced IT pros and newer students
As a security trainer, you are charged with trying to educate everyone from highly trained IT professionals to new students about cutting-edge testing abilities that will allow them to help their organizations remains protected from a broad range of potential threats and vulnerabilities.
You may have tools that you utilize to demonstrate recommended practices to individual classes, but it remains challenging to find a package that is useful for teaching across varied skill levels and providing detailed examples of how and why testing works to help organizations identify and prioritize their weaknesses across a range of platforms.
You’re likely already using exploit creation frameworks and hand scripting tools to show students how to create threats that can be used to validate the existence and validity of vulnerabilities and to gauge the efficacy of defensive security products, but these systems require levels of technical acumen that make them hard to demonstrate in the confines and time constraints of the classroom, and to translate into easily understandable terms for less experienced trainees.
It’s also useful to allow students to try their hand at security testing as part of the educational process, and technologies that require a heavy load of technical ability or manual effort to work make it hard to do so within the limits of the classroom.
To help students walk away from your courses with hands-on skills that allow them to delve further into security testing right away, you need a teaching aid that streamlines many of these processes, allowing you to demonstrate a wide range of threat scenarios in short order: via automated security testing software.
The solution:
Comprehensive penetration testing software solutions
Show your students how the penetration testing process really works and let them try it for themselves
Core Security’s CORE IMPACT Pro commercial-grade security testing solution allows you to demonstrate all the vital elements of sound security testing process to your students and give them a chance to try out some exploits for themselves to give them the full learning experience. When you choose CORE IMPACT Pro, you get:
- Comprehensive penetration testing capabilities across a wide range of threat vectors including network systems, endpoint systems, email users, web applications and wireless networks.
- A unique drag-and-drop interface that allows you to create and launch many different types of tests in a rapid, easy-to-understand fashion.
- A product that reflects over a decade of professional vulnerability research and commercial-grade exploit development, constantly updated as threats emerge.
- Automation of traditionally mundane tasks that add repeatability and efficiency to the security testing process.
- The ability to “look beneath the hood” and manually fine-tune penetration tests to your specific requirements.
- Safe emulation of multistaged threats testing both perimeter and internal defenses using privilege escalation and pivoting techniques to drill down to an organization’s most critical assets -- identifying gaps in point solution coverage.
- Actionable data in the form of detailed reporting of risks, including systems targeted, tests conducted, vulnerabilities exploited, and available exposure paths -- plus links to patches and remediation guidance.
- Reports tailored to highlight results related to specific compliance mandates including the PCI Data Security Standard.
CORE IMPACT Pro enables professional security trainers to pass along the widest range of testing skills to their students in the limited timeframes they have to do so, leaving trainees feeling that they have acquired vital skills that will allow them to immediately begin helping their organizations identify and improve their overall security standing.
Ultimately, Core Security Technologies helps you illustrate the real risks that threaten your students’ organizations -- allowing you to offer them a comprehensive level of training that will convince their managers to continue to invest in your services.
Tap into a wealth of threat expertise
When you use CORE IMPACT products for security testing, you get more than just software applications; you get a culmination of ongoing, independent vulnerability research from some of the best minds in the business.
The CoreLabs research team filters hundreds of vulnerabilities per month to determine which pose critical threats to our customers. This analysis, combined the company’s own vulnerability discoveries and the Core Security Consulting group’s field experience, drives the development of real-world threat models by Core Engineering.
These threat models, in the form of exploits and other attack mechanisms, help to make CORE IMPACT the most comprehensive, effective security testing solution available today.
