Discovering cybersecurity terminologies
Throughout your journey in the exciting field of cybersecurity, you will be exposed to various jargon and terminologies that are commonly found in various literature, discussions, and learning resources. As an aspiring penetration tester, it's important you are aware of and understand various key terminologies and how they are related to penetration testing.
The following is a list of the most common terminologies within the cybersecurity industry:
- Asset – Within the field of cybersecurity, we define an asset as anything that has value to an organization or person. Assets are systems within a network that can be interacted with and potentially expose the network or organization to weaknesses that could be exploited and give hackers a way to escalate their privileges from standard user access to administrator-/root-level access or gain remote access to the network. It is important to mention that assets are not and should not be limited to technical systems. Other forms of assets include humans, physical security controls, and even data that resides within the networks we aim to protect.
Assets can be broken down into three categories:
- Tangible: These are physical things such as networking devices, computer systems, and appliances.
- Intangible: These are things that are not in a physical form, such as intellectual property, business plans, data, and records.
- People: These are the employees who drive the business or organization. Humans are one of the most vulnerable assets in the field of cybersecurity. Additionally, organizations need to protect their customers' data from being stolen by threat actors.
As cybersecurity professionals, it's important to be able to identify assets and the potential threats that may cause harm to them.
- Threat – In the context of cybersecurity, a threat is anything that has the potential to cause harm to a system, network, or person. Whether you're on the offensive or defensive side in cybersecurity, it's important to be able to identify threats. Many organizations around the world face various types of threats each day and their cybersecurity team works around the clock to ensure the organization's assets are safeguarded from threat actors and threats. One of the most exciting, but also overwhelming, aspects of cybersecurity is professionals within the industry always need to stay one step ahead of threat actors to quickly find security weaknesses in systems, networks, and applications, and implement countermeasures to mitigate any potential threats against those assets.
All organizations have assets that need to be kept safe; an organization's systems, networks, and assets always contain some sort of security weakness that can be taken advantage of by a hacker. Next, we'll dive into understanding what a vulnerability is.
- Vulnerability – A vulnerability is a weakness or security flaw that exists within technical, physical, or human systems that hackers can exploit in order to gain unauthorized access or control over systems within a network. Common vulnerabilities that exist within organizations include human error (the greatest of vulnerabilities on a global scale), misconfiguration of devices, using weak user credentials, poor programming practices, unpatched operating systems and outdated applications on host systems, using default configurations on systems, and so on.
A threat actor will look for the lowest-hanging fruits such as the vulnerabilities that are the easiest to be taken advantage of. The same concept applies to penetration testing. During an engagement, the penetration tester will use various techniques and tools to discover vulnerabilities and will attempt to exploit the easy ones before moving to the more complex security flaws on a target system.
- Exploit – An exploit is the thing, tool, or code that is used to take advantage of a vulnerability on a system. For example, take a hammer, a piece of wood, and a nail. The vulnerability is the soft, permeable nature of wood, and the exploit is the act of hammering the nail into the wood. Once a vulnerability is found on a system, the threat actor or penetration tester will either develop or search for an exploit that is able to take advantage of the security weakness. It's important to understand that the exploit should be tested on a system to ensure it has the potential to be successful when launched by the threat actor. Sometimes, an exploit may work on a system and may not work on another. Hence, seasoned penetration testers will ensure their exploits are tested and graded on their rate of success per vulnerability.
- Risk – While it may seem like penetration testers are hired to simulate real-world cyber-attacks on a target organization, the goal of such engagements is much deeper than it seems. At the end of the penetration test, the cybersecurity professional will present all the vulnerabilities and possible solutions to help the organization mitigate and reduce the risk of a potential cyber-attack.
What is risk? Risk is the potential impact that a vulnerability, threat, or asset presents to an organization calculated against all other vulnerabilities, threats, and assets. Evaluating risk helps to determine the likelihood of a specific issue causing a data breach that will cause harm to an organization's finances, reputation, or regulatory compliance. Reducing risk is critical for many organizations. There are many certifications, regulatory standards, and frameworks that are designed to help companies understand, identify, and reduce risks.
- Zero-day – A zero-day attack is an exploit that is unknown to the world, including the vendor of the product, which means it is unpatched by the vendor. These attacks are commonly used in nation-state attacks, as well as by large criminal organizations. The discovery of a zero-day exploit can be very valuable to ethical hackers and penetration testers, and can earn them a bug bounty. These bounties are fees paid by vendors to security researchers that discover unknown vulnerabilities in their applications.
Today, many organizations have established a bug bounty program, which allows interested persons who discover a vulnerability within a system of a vendor to report it. The person who reports the vulnerability, usually a zero-day flaw, is given a reward. However, there are hackers who intentionally attempt to exploit a system or network for some sort of personal gain; this is known as the hack value.
During this section, you have discovered various key terminologies that are commonly used within the cybersecurity industry. In the next section, you will explore the various phases of penetration testing.
