How Red Teams Hack Your Site To Save It

Nerval's Lobster writes "The use of a Red Team and penetration testing can strengthen an organization's security posture. But how does a Red Team member actually think like an attacker, and use that mindset to exploit security vulnerabilities? Gillis Jones works for WhiteHat Security, where his job rests within the TRC (Threat Research Center). It's here that he performs hands-on site assessments, which involve manually confirming all the issues reported by an automatic scan of a particular Website or application. His job includes checking the application's POST and GET requests for reflection of any inputs. He also checks for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), which includes stored, reflected, and DOM XSS vulnerabilities. Those checks let him determine the Website’s basic security posture. If user input isn’t encoded or sanitized, that’s a good indicator of other problems. And if that’s the case, then Jones (or someone like him) will move on to checking for SQL Injection (SQLi) vulnerabilities and other issues."

Re:This is actually common in corporations...

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Eh, I've taught security. I would dispute the "frequently" part of that, but of course pen testing and other forms of evaluation have been going on for years. The interesting part is how you do it. Most organizations could afford to learn a LOT about this subject...