For those of you who do pentesting for a living (or even as a hobby), do you find the most common vulnerabilities are the people or the systems? And if it's the systems is there a usual suspect (software that is always vulnerable)?
Social Engineering vs Vulnerabilities? |
Jul 23, 2017 11:21 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 23, 2017 11:22 PM by The-hunter22.)
From my experience, I find the most vulnerabilities in the software. Here in the Netherlands people are very aware, sometimes they cant handle my charisma but often they just misconfigure a firewall or dont patch their software. That is the most common, in my experience. Once you have a client who is good protected and has good policies for theyr digital security, then they are so focused on the digital side, that they forget the human side. They dont have strict policies for oncommon things, and you can abuse that during a pentest.
That doesnt mean software isnot getting more secure, it is just that nog every company uses the resoirces to secure itself. They just simple dont patch it, or do it in a wrong way. When they do it right, then the human side is the most vulnerable side.
I mainly do work in the UK and I haven't had a Spear Phishing engagement (yet) that didn't come out with at least a 30% success rate. I have had a couple of external tests that haven't resulted in a compromise however almost all internal tests result in some sort of compromise.
Statistically, from my experience, I would have to say that people are more exploitable than software. JammyD 
This all depends on how good you are as a penetration tester, no system is hack proof, and no human is hack proof. They are still finding vulnurable points during fuzzing and large companies and organisations are still getting hacked trough social engineering, like NSA or CIA. One big proof in how social engineering is a great method is by thinking like this, how did they get the IP to cias office? because someone did a huge misstake, or insider job.
But systems are usually more vulnurable than the people behind the service in my opinion, websites that are done before 2008 are more likely to be vulnurable than websites that were done after 2013 since they didn't think about updating everything in their server 
It depends on what you are trying to do. Larger organizations provide you with a larger number of potential SE targets; increasing your likelihood of success. However, they organizations have more money and resources for security teams, appliances and other mitigations. Smaller organizations are more likely to have vulnerable/unpatched software, but might still have limited forward facing infrastructure to attack. Their SE footprint will also be smaller, but provide you more possible avenues (maybe just easier avenues; i.e older or un-administered system) of attack.
A Biggest hacks is due to a simple eroor, it can be human, or from system side .
exazmple: when n update is launched, and a system is not patched, or take some delay to get updated, a hacker can exploited brefore it's get patched . It's amttr of time . HUMAN side 'SE' Is the king of hacking techiques . 
Jul 27, 2017 06:16 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 27, 2017 06:16 PM by SQLInjekt.)
almost all attacks are carried out by some form of social engineering. its a very essential technique to have in your toolbox.
 
A good dev / programer has to be a good SEngineer, otherwise it will be very hard for any jobs later. When you did a perfect exploit but this one is only detected by one AV, so you'll have to SE you victim, imagine than he or she has the one AV that detects it. It will be very dangerous to try any attack. So you'd better SE to see what AV she or he has, or simply do your job. If SE is too hard for you, try drama lessons 🙂
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