Recently, Core Security released the 2024 Penetration Testing Report, which shares the results from an annual survey of cybersecurity professionals on their experiences with offensive security strategies and solutions. In this series, we’ll take a deeper dive into some of the most noteworthy findings from the survey, with expert insights from Fortra’s CISO, Chris Reffkin, and Lead Product Manager for Infrastructure Protection, Pablo Zurro.

Do you know the difference between internal pen tests, external pen tests, and wireless pen tests? It matters.

Recently, Core Security released the 2024 Penetration Testing Report, which shares the results from an annual survey of cybersecurity professionals on their experiences with offensive security strategies and solutions.

Core Impact Updates

New UI and Usability Improvements for Reports 

The Core Impact Reports have been modernized, with data reviewed to improve its actionability and user friendliness.

Cybersecurity budgets are beginning to get cut across the country, and organizations are faced with tough choices about what should stay and what should go. As security budgets face extra scrutiny and potential cuts, it’s critical to evaluate the cost and benefits of each security practice. It can be difficult to define the value of proactive security solutions like pen testing, as a precise ROI is hard to determine. After all, how does one quantify attacks that were prevented?

A common tactic of attackers trying to breach an environment is to use an exploit against a known vulnerability in an application or device present in a targeted infrastructure. Exploiting a vulnerability can provide an attacker with privileges or capabilities they would not normally be granted.

Core Impact Updates

During the month of February, updates have been made to Core Impact to enhance its functionality. New modules have been added to perform Active Directory attacks taking advantage of new features from the latest version of Impacket.

NTLM (NT Lan Manager) relay attacks are still a significant threat to the security of Windows based networks. Though it is a well-known attack method that has been around for many years, it is no less dangerous than when it first emerged. In fact, it has been an attack method that is currently popular with “aggressive” hacking groups, including the Russian APT28. These groups have successfully used relay attacks to target multiple high-value targets worldwide.

One of Core Impact’s most valuable features is its certified exploit library. Fortra’s Core Security has a team of expert exploit writers that conduct research, evaluating and prioritizing the most relevant vulnerabilities in order to update the library with critical and useful exploits.  Additionally, the QA team creates its own clean environment to validate each exploit before its release to ensure our standards and validate that it is safe and ready to use.