Privacy Defended: Protecting Yourself Online

Security Testing Procedures

Security testing should follow a logical progression. The first thing to remember is that you can only conduct testing against your own site. If you start trying to break into other sites to test their security measures, you become a hacker and break the law, even if you mean no harm. Before you proceed, be sure you know exactly what your IP address is and only conduct your tests against that IP address.

The basic steps you need to take to conduct a security test of your environment include discovery, enumeration, vulnerability mapping, password cracking, and exploitation. We will go through the first four steps and leave a detailed discussion of exploitation to another book. Exploitation of vulnerabilities usually ...