The 5 Phases of Ethical Hacking

As technology becomes more important to businesses throughout the world, the importance of safeguarding business-critical apps and their underlying tech stack grows. With the constantly changing threat landscape, it is frequently impractical to uncover vulnerabilities in real time by relying solely on automated methods. To aid in this, Ethical Hacking has grown in popularity due to its efficiency in replicating real-world attacks and discovering gaps.

This article defines ethical hacking and describes the five steps of the ethical hacking method.

What is Ethical Hacking

Ethical hacking is a set of practices in which businesses enable individuals to exploit system vulnerabilities in order to gain a better understanding of their current security posture. A security expert or researcher performs an ethical hack by replicating the behaviors and methods of a malevolent hacker. This assists development and security teams in detecting and identifying security risks before hackers exploit them.

Ethical hacking, also known as White Hat Hacking, is a critical stage in determining the efficiency of a company's security policy. The goal of ethical hacking is to imitate the actions of hackers in order to detect present and potential vulnerabilities in the future. To do this, an ethical hacker goes through several steps of evaluation in order to gather as much in-depth understanding about the system as feasible.

What are the Phases of Ethical Hacking?

Finding and fully exploiting system vulnerabilities takes great time and patience. A typical penetration testing requires the ethical hacker to bypass authorization & authentication mechanisms, then probe the network for potential data breaches and network security threats. As a real-world black hat hacker consistently devises new ways to exploit vulnerabilities, an effective, ethical hack should be carefully thought out considering the changing threat landscape.

Ethical hackers undertake several steps of the ethical hacking methodology to find such vulnerabilities. These steps of hacking include: Reconnaissance, Scanning, Gaining Access, Maintaining Access, and Clearing Track. While not every hacker follows these steps in sequential order, they offer a systematic approach that yields better results. Let us take a closer look at what these hack phases offer.

1. Reconnaissance

Before performing any penetration tests, hackers footprint the system and gather as much information as possible. Reconnaissance is a preparatory phase where the hacker documents the organization’s request, finds the system’s valuable configuration and login information and probes the networks. This information is crucial to performing the attacks and includes:

• Naming conventions

• Services on the network

• Servers handling workloads in the network

• IP Addresses

• Names and Login credentials of users connected to the network

• The physical location of the target machine

2. Scanning

In this stage, the ethical hacker begins testing the networks and machines to identify potential attack surfaces. This involves gathering information on all machines, users, and services within the network using automated scanning tools. Penetration testing typically undertakes three types of scans:

Network Mapping

This involves discovering the network topology, including host information, servers, routers, and firewalls within the host network. Once mapped, white hat hackers can visualize and strategize the next steps of the ethical hacking process.

Port Scanning

Ethical hackers use automated tools to identify any open ports on the network. This makes it an efficient mechanism to enumerate the services and live systems in a network and how to establish a connection with these components.

Vulnerability Scanning

The use of automated tools to detect weaknesses that can be exploited to orchestrate attacks.

While there are several tools available, here are a few popular ethical hacking tools commonly used during the scanning phase:

• SNMP Sweepers

• Ping sweeps

• Network mappers

• Vulnerability scanners

3. Gaining Access

Once ethical hackers expose vulnerabilities through the process’s first and second hacking phases, they now attempt to exploit them for administrative access. The third phase involves attempting to send a malicious payload to the application through the network, an adjacent subnetwork, or physically using a connected computer. Hackers typically use many hacking tools and techniques to simulate attempted unauthorized access, including:

• Buffer overflows

• Phishing

• Injection Attacks

• XML External Entity Attacks

• Using components with known vulnerabilities

If the attacks are successful, the hacker has control of the whole or part of the system and may simulate further attacks such as data breaches and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

4. Maintaining Access

The fourth phase of the ethical hacking process involves processes to ensure the hacker can access the application for future use. A white-hat hacker continuously exploits the system for further vulnerabilities and escalates privileges to understand how much control attackers can gain once they pass security clearance. Some attackers may also try to hide their identity by removing the evidence of an attack and installing a backdoor for future access.

5. Clearing Tracks

To avoid any evidence that leads back to their malicious activity, hackers perform tasks that erase all traces of their actions. These include:

• Uninstalling scripts/applications used to carry out attacks

• Modifying registry values

• Clearing logs

• Deleting folders created during the attack

For those hackers looking to maintain undetected access, they tend to hide their identity using techniques such as:

• Tunneling

• Stenography

Having successfully performed all the 5 steps of ethical hacking, the ethical hacker then concludes the steps of ethical hacking by documenting a report on the vulnerabilities and suggesting remediation advice. 

Source: https://crashtest-security.com/five-steps-of-ethical-hacking/