"What would be the reason to test behind the firewall?"
Well, corporate espionage and sabotage come to mind. We have two
separate teams where I work. One tests external threats and attempts
to attack from outside. The other team (the one I'm on) does
vulnerability assessments from the inside. (we also use a consulting
firm to do their own external pen-tests on us).
A lot of damage/loss/theft comes in the form of employees.
Disgruntled, bored, greedy, or just plain malicious. This is even
more of an issue for companies that are financial or high tech in
nature.
By only testing from outside a perimeter firewall you are setting
yourself up for "crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside" type
situation.
Of course, InfoSec involves much, much more than just vulnerability
management and external firewalling. Defense-in-depth is key:
IDS/IPS, port filtering, subnet firewalls, bandwidth profiling, etc..
On 19 Jul 2006 13:33:13 -0000, mr.nasty@ix.netcom.com
<mr.nasty@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
Thanks for the responses. You've confirmed what I had passed to mgmt. But I
still have a problem (with mgmt) understanding why?...
I perform vulnerability analysis on our outside (public) web presense,
usually during development and then after it's been deployed. I basically use
the same tools for each.
Mgmt wants me to only test through the firewall as if I'm coming in like
the public. The rational is that the fw will prevent any attacks though ports
other than 80 and 443. Therefore, there is no reason to change this
configuration.
What would be the reason to test behind the firewall?
Any suggestions?
Thanks
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