Professional Penetration Testing

CHAPTER 8. Management of a PenTest

Introduction

Возле людей потирайся, да ума набирайся. – Russian proverb: “The more you hang out with people, the more you pick their brains.”

(S. Aguryanov, personal communication, April 28, 2009)

Managing a penetration test team is different than managing people in sales, human resources, customer service, or marketing. The engineers on a PenTest team are often “geeks,” as explained in Paul Glen's book titled Leading Geeks. Glen attempts to quantify the difficulty in managing geeks by defining geeks as “highly intelligent, usually introverted, extremely valuable, independent-minded, hard-to-find, difficult-to-keep technology workers” (Glen, 2003). With those ...