Assessing Network Security

Chapter 22. How Attackers Avoid Detection

The goal of your penetration test might be to test detection mechanisms in your organization, such as the intrusion detection systems (IDS) or intrusion prevention systems (IPS). How did your detection mechanisms respond to stealthy attacks? What did they catch and, more importantly, what did they miss? If the attacker was successful, how is she hiding her presence on your organization’s hosts? Being able to answer questions like these will have great value in your penetration reports because they will help you fine-tune your organization’s security posture and find little misconfiguration trolls. Even if when the objective of your penetration tests does not include stealth, being able to pinpoint where ...