Security Analyst Issues

You’re sitting at your desk. Typing furiously. Trying to crack a password so you can gain access to that network you’ve been sniffing all day. You’ve tried every command you know and you think you finally found a way in. This is it your about to gain access when suddenly your boss walks over and tells you funding’s been cut and your internal penetration test has been canceled. This is a common story you hear about, but the most common ones are even better. When someone thinks they are conducting a legal penetration test and they are accidently committing a cybercrime. In this paper we will discuss what a security analyst does for a company and some of the ways pen testing can go wrong, and how they are ethically wrong and could have been …show more content…
This person can hold many positions in an organization. This person could do incident response that consists of preventing and fixing issues cause by breaches in systems. A security analyst could also do monitoring of the network to make sure users are not breaching codes of conduct. The biggest thing most security analysts do however is penetration testing. This is where the security analyst scans the organization to find weaknesses in cyber defense that can be taken advantage of if a breach were to happen. The way they do this is by actually breaching the systems and trying to take advantage just as an unethical hacker would. The security analyst would than fix these issues or report them to the proper management to see that they would get fixed.

One really common mistake in penetration testing is that there may be a miscommunication on the authorization of said penetration test. If this were to happen to a penetration tester, it could lead to a significant legal issue. If a white hat tester gets mistaken for a black hat tester the legal ramifications could include massive fines and jail time. The fix to this scenario is way too easy. All a pentation tester needs to do is make sure they have a signed legal agreement from the organization that is being tested. However there is a small twist to …show more content…
If the tester accidently goes into the internet service provider’s router without their permission the tester could face the same legal ramifications as stated above. Therefore in order to make sure you are covered before conducting a penetration test the tester needs to assembly a map of what devices could possibly be on the network and get a written signed copy of approval from the owners of all the devices on the network. This can cause issues because a lot of company’s don’t want to sign anything. If they don’t sign, do not test. This signed agreement is a penetration testers get out of jail free card. If the federal bureau of investigation breaks down your door you better grab that paper and scream don’t shoot I’m innocent.

The crucial point I want to cover is scope and coverage. If a company hires a penetration tester they normally give a written outline of what they want and need tested. This also comes with a piece of information stating where the tester is not allowed to go. This allows the tester to know what his coverage of the test should be and allows the organization being tested the peace of mind to know their systems aren’t being tampered with in a way they are not expecting. If a penetration tester accidently goes out of the scope or coverage of his test this could be very