Alpine Security is excited to announce the extension of its annual holiday sale, which provides those preparing for cybersecurity exams the opportunity to gain the skills and knowledge they need at a significantly discounted rate. These steep discounts will remain available until December 31st, 2018.
The extended holiday sale provides a 30% discount for all courses included on Alpine Security's public schedule. While this particular discount must be applied by the end of the year, the courses themselves extend until June 2019. As soon as aspiring students decide which courses they wish to take, they can easily apply the holiday discount with the coupon code HOLIDAY30 as they complete the online store's easy-to-navigate checkout process.
Alpine Security's course fees are all-inclusive — exam vouchers and fees are automatically included in the cost of each course. Those who prefer not to pay exam fees upfront can opt-out, and, instead, take courses at a further discounted rate. All cybersecurity courses come with Exam Pass Guarantees — students who do not pass exams on the first try are allowed to resit courses free of charge. Additionally, students who don't feel fully prepared are allowed to resit courses before taking exams.
All of Alpine Security's courses are taught both live online and in-person by industry authorities boasting considerable certificates and real-world experience in penetration testing, incident response, auditing, and forensic analysis. Courses are offered both during the day and in the evening.
Cecilie Kreiner, Alpine Security's Training Manager, hopes this year's significant holiday discount will allow those seeking cybersecurity training to give themselves the gift of a quality education.
"We are excited to offer this holiday sale. We hope current discounts, along with our Exam Pass Guarantee, will convince students to get the training they need. We're thrilled to do our part building a new generation of cybersecurity professionals while making our industry more accessible." - Cecilie Kreiner, Training Manager, Alpine Security
Additional information about Alpine Security's course offerings and Exam Pass Guarantee can be found by visiting the company's website.
ABOUT ALPINE SECURITY
A highly regarded Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), Alpine Security offers a variety of cybersecurity certification courses. The company also provides in-demand cybersecurity services such as penetration testing, risk assessments, incident response, audits, and digital forensics. Based in the St. Louis area and accredited by CompTIA and EC-Council, Alpine Security provides easy accessibility to the cybersecurity skills and services needed both locally and worldwide.
This blog features an interview of Alpine Security’s CEO, Christian Espinosa, on medical device security by Caroline Cornell, originally posted at classaction.com.
Could you provide an overview of the cybersecurity threats the medical field faces? How big is this problem?
Medical devices have largely been neglected from a cybersecurity perspective. Many of these devices run legacy operating systems, are full of vulnerabilities, and were not intended to be connected to hospital networks. For ease of management, data access, updates, etc., many medical devices are now connected to hospital networks, which have connections to the Internet.
Hospital networks are inherently unsecure; any threats to a hospital network are transferred to connected medical devices. Threats to implantable devices are primarily due to unsecure wireless communications. Implantables were designed to be easy to monitor and update via wireless technology. It is too risky to perform heart surgery every time a pacemaker or implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) needs to be updated, for example.
The threats to medical devices are a big problem with severe and potentially lethal consequences.
As a white hat hacker, what’s your process for identifying security vulnerabilities? Do you try to hack everything and anything, or do you gravitate towards particular types of devices or networks?
Our process depends on the scope of the engagement. If we are asked to assess a medical device, we typically have several main phases—1) we perform a discovery to learn more about the device; 2) we define a security boundary for the device; 3) we perform a risk assessment of the device; 4) we identify all possible entry points in the system/device; 5) we develop attack trees and assess all entry points into the system using penetration testing and other techniques; 6) based on the results of 1-5, we determine a mitigation strategy; 7) we generate the report.
As for hacking everything and anything, the process I just mentioned applies a risk-based approach to our assessment. We focus on the big-ticket items first with the highest risk to patient safety, emphasizing how the device could be misused and the effect of attacks on data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We work with manufacturers and providers to fix the most critical items first, then work down a prioritized list, based on the risk. We also run validation tests to ensure remediation steps worked.
How receptive are companies when you do identify a vulnerability? Do they usually address the issue?
Some are more receptive than others. Sometimes we are met with resistance, such as “there’s no way someone would think of doing that.” Most often though, our findings are well-received.
Unfortunately, company bureaucracy, cost, timelines, and other factors present obstacles to fixing devices under development or devices deployed in the field. It is very costly for medical device manufacturers to fix devices that are deployed across the world, or ones that are in the middle of development.
What do you think makes medical devices and hospital networks so appealing to hackers?
“If you can hack into a medical device, you can directly affect a person’s physical state and well-being.”
A couple reasons. One is that PHI (protected health information) is more valuable than other types of information. Patient records sell for more than other types of stolen sensitive data on the black market.
Another reason is the physical effects that can be caused by hacking medical devices. Normally, if you steal credit card data from a web application, you may inconvenience someone—that’s an indirect effect to the person. If you can hack into a medical device though, you can directly affect a person’s physical state and well-being.
What is the one type of security vulnerability that keeps you up at night?
There’s not one that keeps me up at night. I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s just a matter of time before something catastrophic happens. There’s already been many warning signs, yet there is a head-in-the-sand mindset still. Almost like “if we pretend it’s not there, the threat doesn’t exist.”
“I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s just a matter of time before something catastrophic happens.”
If I had to pick one threat that would keep me up at night though, it is the threat of weaponized medical nanotechnology, a form of biomedical hacking.
Nanotechnology, or “nanotech,” are basically extremely small computers, smaller than a pinhead. Nanobots can be used in the human body for items such as targeting cancer cells to destroy them by delivering chemotherapy to only cancer cells.
These nanobots can also be used to deliver lethal toxins or carry out specific missions in the human body, such as making your arms temporarily unmovable, or similar. The scary thing is they can be introduced to the human body very easily. You could breathe them in and not even know.
Do you think the FDA is doing enough to prevent and respond to cyberattacks?
I think the challenge is identifying who is ultimately responsible for medical device security—the device manufacturer, the user, the hospital, clinic, the Department of Homeland Security, the FDA, the doctor, patient, etc.?
The FDA has basically issued premarket and postmarket guidance for medical devices and passed the responsibility to healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs). According to the FDA, “HDOs are responsible for implementing devices on their networks and may need to patch or change devices and/or supporting infrastructure to reduce security risks. Recognizing that changes require risk assessment, the FDA recommends working closely with medical device manufacturers to communicate changes that are necessary.”
We recently spoke with a medical professional who told us that “doctors don’t become doctors to protect data.” What role does the average doctor play in maintaining secure medical devices and networks?
I agree with this statement. Doctors have enough to worry about. They should be given a list of “approved medical devices” that they can use and recommend. These devices should be thoroughly vetted for cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Penetration testing and other methods should be used.
The challenge becomes where does this “approved list of medical devices” come from? Who has the approval authority? This is not a simple problem to solve, because medical devices are complex systems with many vulnerabilities, both known and unknown. What is approved today, could be recalled tomorrow. This should not be the responsibility of the doctor.
Penetration testing, also known as ethical hacking, is one of the hottest jobs in tech today. What other career lets you pretend you're in The Matrix, working your way into systems like a top-level hacker, all without breaking any laws. Oh, and you're getting paid for it.
With a real-world penetration testing job, though, you're not just playing at hacking into systems. You actually are hacking into systems, and your employer's very existence may depend on your ability to do it.
What to Expect From a Penetration Testing Career
As a penetration tester, often known as a “pen” tester, your job is to identify security vulnerabilities in a company's internal systems and outward-facing applications. You might test a whole system, but you'll probably test only part of a system at a time.
Either way, you are responsible for finding any weaknesses that a hacker could use to get in, so you need to run a lot of tests.
A lot of tests.
No real job is as glamorous as the movies, and penetration testing really is no exception. Some of the tests you have to run are repetitive. If the system is strong, you'll get a lot of negative findings and just move on to the next test without much fanfare.
But sometimes, you'll hit the proverbial pay dirt.
You'll figure out how to breach a system before a criminal does. You'll show your client how to patch up the hole in the system and keep sensitive data out of the wrong hands. On those days, you'll earn your client's unending gratitude.
What Kind of Person Does This?
If you're drawn to ethical hacking jobs, you probably have an analytical mind. You love problems because solving them gets your mind working overtime, and you believe that a brick wall is just a test of how badly you want to get to the other side.
These are the qualities that you need as a penetration tester. It's a challenging job, but some people really thrive in it. These are the people who have:
a genuine interest in how systems work
a tactical mindset
a quick mind
persistence to a fault
Perhaps most importantly, though, you need to be a good communicator. Contrary to the stereotype of the reclusive and awkward tech geek, you won't get anywhere in pen testing unless you can communicate your highly technical work to someone in a different field. Put simply, you need to make your client understand what you've found and why it matters.
Great Expectations
When a company hires you as a penetration tester, it puts its most sensitive and valuable data in your hands. Your clients will want to know that you can do the job, so they expect you to have certain skills. First of all, you need to know everything possible about operating systems, networks, and scripting.
Also, there are plenty of automated programs out there that can scan for weaknesses, and a client will need you to know more than the program does. You'll need to be able to find vulnerabilities that have no codes or references within the system because they haven't been found by hackers yet.
You'll need to be able to integrate new exploits into your existing skill set. Tech is constantly evolving, and hackers are always coming up with new ways to breach barriers. You need to be able to hear about a new exploit, try it out, and figure out how to screen for it.
Finally, it helps if you know how to code. Some pen testers get by without it, but you'll save yourself a lot of time if you have some basic skills in the most widely used coding languages.
Let's Talk Money
If you're a good fit, you'll find penetration testing to be a rewarding career in more ways than one. Financially, you start out as an entry-level professional with an average salary around $70,000 and by mid-career, the salary average has crested $100,000.
By the time you are considered experienced, the average salary is around $115,000. Meanwhile, you will have built up your knowledge of the field and potentially supervise more junior professionals.
Starting a Penetration Testing Career
Naturally, a job like this isn't one you can just walk into from your latest gig at McDonald's or Old Navy. You're working with high-security systems and you might have thousands of people's personal data in your hands. You need training and certifications, not to mention the kind of personality that can handle an intensely high-stakes position.
So it's not surprising that most penetration testers get into the field from other areas of tech, such as systems administration or programming. The majority of hiring companies want the pen tester that they hire to have at least a bachelor's degree in a field related to IT or cybersecurity. Most also ask for particular certifications.
Entry Level Credentials
If you're just getting started in pen testing, one of the entry-level certifications will show an employer that you're serious about the field. Here are a few of the ones they like to see.
CEH Snapshot (click to enlarge)
Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)
The CEH certification is an entry-level credential offered by the EC Security Council. It requires you to pass a 4-hour, 125-question multiple choice exam that covers the latest tactics hackers use to breach security systems. If you pass this portion, you can take a 6-hour practical exam to demonstrate more advanced knowledge.
Certified Penetration Tester (CPT)
The CPT is the entry-level certification offered through the Information Assurance Certification Review Board, more commonly known as the IACRB. The associated multiple-choice exam is two hours and includes 50 questions, 70 percent of which you have to answer correctly to pass.
Intermediate and Advanced Certifications
Even when you're already established in pen testing, you need to show that you're up to date with the latest advances in the field. That's where the more advanced certification programs come in.
ECSA snapshot (click to enlarge)
EC Council Certified Security Analyst (ECSA)
The ECSA is the EC Council's intermediate credential. It requires the candidate to pass a four-hour, 150-question test as well as a 12-hour practical exam. The practical exam presents you with a real organization's network and evaluates your ability to use network scanning, vulnerability analysis, and other common pen testing techniques to get into it.
PenTest+
The PenTest+ certification is offered through CompTIA. It is an intermediate-level exam that features written questions as well as a practical questions. Over the course of 2.75 hours, these challenges evaluate our ability to find a system's weaknesses and develop strategies to address them.
Certified Expert Penetration Tester (CEPT)
The CEPT test is the IACRB's follow-up to the CPT exam, and it covers the nine domains of penetration testing knowledge. These include:
Penetration Testing Methodologies
Network Attacks and Recon
Memory Corruption and Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities
Reverse Engineering
The nine domains are covered in a 50-question multiple choice test. The candidate has two hours to complete at least 70 percent of the questions correctly to receive a passing score.
Licensed Penetration Tester (LPT)
The LPT is the EC Security Council's most elite certification. Not for the faint of heart, it requires aspiring recipients to endure a three-level, 18-hour exam. Those who succeed are considered to be the industry's top experts.
Each level of the exam is six hours long and presents you with three challenges. You advance to the next level if and only if you are able to complete at least one of the three challenges. In all, you need to complete five of the nine challenges to pass the test.
This exam gives you a real-world security situation and 24 hours to solve it. You present your results in the form of notes and screenshots that show what you have learned about the system and its vulnerabilities. Your score depends on the complexity and depth of the vulnerabilities you find.
Offensive Security Certified Expert (OSCE)
This one's a real marathon. It takes 48 hours to complete, but it shows that you know how to tackle the security issues that less advanced ethical hackers can't handle. It's one of the industry's most difficult tests. If you've passed it, companies know that you can take on the toughest problems out there.
Passing the Tests
These are not tests you want to mess around with. It's one thing to have to re-take an exam in undergrad, but not when you're investing up to 18 hours in taking the test alone. Also, you're depending on these tests to start or advance your career.
Alpine Security understands what's on the line. That's why we offer preparation courses for all of the most commonly requested tests in cybersecurity, many of which come with an exam pass guarantee and exam voucher.
Most importantly, Alpine hires successful working penetration testers as its trainers and routinely performs penetration testing - it is one of their main services. This real-world experience assures that you're getting the latest knowledge in the field. Don't wait to start hacking for a living. Contact Alpine today and start hitting the books.
You've probably seen leetspeak, also known as 1337 or “l33t,” somewhere on the Internet or in a movie about computer hacking. It's essentially regular English, but with more hacker slang and with certain letters changed to numbers.
Leetspeak – An Origin Story
Developed in the early 1980s, leetspeak actually predates the World Wide Web by nearly a decade. It started on Bulletin Board Systems when the Internet was first developing and only people with elite status could access certain content. That content often included information that those elites didn't want anyone outside their circles to find.
Outsmarting the System
In those days, search functions scanned for specific keywords to identify their targets. Early hacker communities figured out that changing a few of the letters within a word could throw the search engines off the proverbial scent. By using “h3ll0” for “hello,” for example, they could protect the privacy of their content while keeping it readable among themselves.
The Mark of an "3l33t"
As leetspeak became more well-known, gamers began to use it to present themselves as high status. The phrase “1 4m 3l33t!” (or, “I am elite!”) became a popular way for both gamers and hackers to show that they had reached the top of the pack.
Levels of L33t
Th1s s3nt3nc3 1s wr1tt3n 1n b4sic l33t. ("This sentence is written in basic leet.")
It's pretty understandable, even to someone who isn't well versed in the world of computer hacking. All you do is get rid of vowels and substitute numbers that look similar.
The Next Step
Intermediate-level leet starts to get the consonants involved, and it looks “50meth1n9 l1k3 th15.” It's more challenging to read than basic leet but still decipherable, particularly to eyes and brains that are already familiar with the basic form. A 5 looks enough like an S, for example, that a reader can go from “is” to “1s” to “15” without excessive confusion.
Advanced Leet
Advanced leet brings in yet more replacements, including more replacements per letter.
If you read a message in basic or intermediate leet, the replacement for the letter E will almost always be the number 3. Once you get into advanced leet, however, you have a lot more options. You can still indicate E using 3, but you can also use &, €, ë, and even |=-. Just the word leet has dozens of possible translations, from the classic l33t to |_&€”|”.
Your Basic L33t Vocabulary
As with any dialect, there are words that anyone who is “in the know” has to have in their vocabulary. Many of them have to do with status. (Specifically, the speaker being of a higher status than others.)
“Pwn”
“Pwn” is one of the most popular leetspeak words in hacker culture. It's an intentional typo of “own,” a word that the early hackers of the 80's used to mean taking over control of another computer.
Urban legends offer a number of explanations for how the shift from “own” to “pwn” happened. Some say that it has always been an intentional misspelling, while others say that it was an honest mistake that took off in common usage.
In either case, it's become a popular way to express your victory or defeat. While you can definitely “pwn” someone, it's also common to admit that you “g0t pwned.” It's usually pronounced “got poned.”
“N00b”
N00b, or “noob” in non-leetspeak, is a shortened form of "newbie." Programmers and hackers started calling people “newbies” around the same time that they started “owning” each others' systems. And like “own,” the word newbie evolved into noob and n00b.
The new spellings are specifically derogatory. Being a “newb” simply means that you're new at something, which is perfectly fine in and of itself. If someone's calling you a “n00b” or “noob,” however, that usually means that they think you're not only new or unskilled but also disrespectfully content to be ignorant.
Haxor
Like the first leetspeak words, "haxor" expresses the speaker's claim to the hacking community. It literally means “hacker” or even “to hack.”
The term "haxor" usually refers to a particularly advanced hacker (or haxor) and may even be used in reference to leetspeak itself. For example, “that haxor always types haxor.”
Leetspeak Out in the World
Even now, leetspeak continues to evolve and make its way into new corners of our perpetually connected society. Google even uses it to communicate with members of the general public, but with an insider nod to hacker culture.
Google's Bug Bounty
The Google Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP), known colloquially as its “bug bounty,” offers rewards to users who can identify and draw Google's attention to security vulnerabilities that can compromise user data.
If a user finds such a vulnerability in a qualifying Google site, the specifics of which are detailed on the VRP website, Google will offer a financial reward. Reward amounts range from $100 to $31,337. Remove the comma and the dollar sign from that maximum amount and you have “31337.”
Or, in non-leetspeak, "eleet."
Hacker Movies
Hacker culture even has its own filmography. A quick Google search for “hacker movies” will give you lists of what dozens of people believe to be the best. Popular titles include:
Untraceable (2008)
The Italian Job (2003)
The Matrix (1999)
Hackers (1995)
One recent example is the movie adaptation of the novel Ready Player One, the story of one gamer's search for the industry's biggest “Easter egg.” The book and the movie both include characters with leetspeak names.
These characters are employees of the big bad corporation, IOI. They are known as the “suxorzs,” or the “sux0rz.” The word is a leetspeak translation of “sixers,” a nickname given because of their avatar names are also their six-digit employee numbers. It is also the leetspeak term for “this sucks.”
Leetspeak and You
Some people take to leetspeak like a natural second language. These are the people who might go on to pursue a career in hacking – and yes, it is possible. Even legal.
The first step is training in cybersecurity and penetration testing. Through professionally designed courses, like those offered by Alpine Security, you can learn the techniques that hackers – sorry, haxors – use to access today's systems.
Go ahead - build a career that will let you pwn the h4x0rs.
Many drug infusion pumps are vulnerable to cyber attacks.
In a move that calls attention to an alarming trend in the world of computer hacking, penetration testing company Alpine Security has announced its intention to focus on cybersecurity for medical devices. These devices are among the latest targets of Alpine's expert cybersecurity team, a group of extensively trained professionals who carry some of the industry's most advanced certifications. These professionals are now working with hospitals, device manufacturing companies, and patient advocacy organizations to keep people safe from hackers that could put their health and lives at risk.
Thanks to Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, doctors can now monitor patients' vital signs and track treatment with unprecedented convenience and accuracy. However, because this technology is so new and still lacks many of the safeguards embedded in older technology, these advances also mean that a patient's private information – and their vital signs themselves – can fall into the hands of hackers.
In 2017, a group of researchers were able to secure equipment that intercepted radio frequency signals from cardiac devices. The researchers showed that they could reprogram those devices to drain the power from the device and even change the patient's own heartbeat remotely. In response, the FDA recalled nearly half a million pacemakers.
The FDA has since cracked down on the security of “smart” medical devices, and providers have taken much of the weight. According to one FDA representative, “Healthcare Delivery Organizations (HDOs) are responsible for implementing devices on their networks and may need to patch or change devices and/or supporting infrastructure to reduce security risks.” This places a major burden on HDOs, which may not have the technological expertise to make the kind of evaluations and adjustments that this responsibility demands.
Alpine has responded to this urgent situation by applying its extensive cybersecurity knowledge and medical device penetration testing capabilities to where it matters most – patient safety. Its skilled team can identify the precise location of network and device weaknesses, getting to them before hackers can.
“Hospitals now have 10-15 networked medical devices per bed. Many devices that monitor vital functions or deliver medication have critical vulnerabilities. It is simply a matter of time before we have a major attack with catastrophic and fatal consequences.” – Christian Espinosa, Alpine Security CEO
In addition to its work with HDOs and device manufacturers, the company has offered its sponsorship to the Archimedes Medical Device Security 101 Conference, to be held in January of 2019 in Orlando, Florida. The conference will be a space where designers and users of networked devices can discuss the most pressing security threats in their industry, and where they can develop actionable solutions.
About Alpine Security
Alpine Security is a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) that evaluates and addresses cybersecurity risks in networks and systems across multiple industries including healthcare. Committed to staying one step ahead of today's most savvy hackers, Alpine uses state-of-the-art methods and offer every type of penetration test. Alpine is particularly experienced in optimizing the cybersecurity of network-enabled medical devices.
Penetration testing, also known as pen testing, is an ethical hacking tactic that helps companies protect themselves. Penetration testers try to break into clients' digital systems to find weaknesses before a black hat hacker does. This is a growing field as companies seek to prevent the high profile data breaches that have happened in recent years. The top penetration testing certifications can help you get into this field.
The Certified Ethical Hacker Certification is recognized the world over as a standard for ethical hackers. You will need to know about the latest hacking and malware tactics to help your future clients prevent security breaches to pass this certification. The course offered by Alpine Security will not only prepare you for the EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker Exam, but we also guarantee you will pass the exam. The four hour test has 125 questions, and establishes your knowledge of the topic at hand. After you receive that certification, take the 6 hour practical exam to show you really know your stuff.
Entry Level, 3 Hour Exam with 82-115 Multiple Choice Questions
GIAC's (Global Information Assurance Certification) GPEN certification is a simple proctored exam with multiple choice questions that takes place over three hours. This test might seem easy compared to the days long practical tests offered by other companies, but the questions cover a range of topics. The proctored test covers not only technical questions about ethical hacking and penetration testing, but also legal topics as they relate to pen testing and other non-technical questions.
Entry Level, 2 Hour Multiple Choice Exam With 50 Questions, Practical Exam (30 Days to Complete)
The CPT Certification is from the IACRB - the Information Assurance Certification Review Board. This is a flexible exam that is proctored both in different locations around the world, or a proctor can come to you as long as you have a group of 10 people who wish to take the text. It tests your knowledge of penetration testing in general, and specifically Windows, Unix & Linux vulnerabilities, wireless security and web application exploits among other things. The exam is multiple choice and as long as you score 70% or better, you will pass. This certification is only valid for four years due to the fact that technology changes so quickly, so if you get this one, make sure you stay current with it. Luckily, getting re-certified is completely free.
Intermediate, 2.75 Hour Long Test with up to 85 Practical & Multiple Choice Questions
PenTest+ is one of the certificates offered by CompTIA, a "vendor-neutral" IT certification organization. The tests take place a Pearson VUE testing centers, which are heavily controlled computer based centers. This exam is generally considered an intermediate exam that tests your ability to assess weaknesses in a system and your ability to suggest strategies to ameliorate weaknesses, with both test questions and a practical portion. Prepare for this exam with Alpine Security's PenTest+ penetration testing training course, which comes with an exam pass guarantee.
The EC Security Council is one of the top certification organizations in the penetration testing industry, and this is their moderate test. They have created several certifications to ensure stability and competence across the industry. There are two exams for this certification. First, there is a four hour multiple choice test with 150 questions. The other exam is a 12 hour test that proves your practical penetration testing skills. As part of the exam, you will be given an actual organization's network to work with. Throughout the 12 hours, you must demonstrate your knowledge of network scans, vulnerability analysis and other important facets of a penetration test. Alpine Security's ECSA ethical hacking training course will prepare you for both tests and the cost of the exam is included with access to the class.
Advanced, 2 Hour Exam with 50 Multiple Choice Questions, Practical Exam (30 Days to Complete)
The Certified Expert Penetration Tester is an advanced exam from the IACRB. This test shows your ability to manipulate shellcode and exploit code, perform reverse engineering tasks and other advanced penetration testing techniques. It is similar to the CPT exam in that it is only valid for four years, and it is a multiple choice test. This one has 50 questions administered over 2 hours.
LPT is the most advanced certificate offered by the EC Security Council. Those with this certificate are typically considered experts in the field. The LPT practical exam is a whopping 18 hours long. Alpine Security's APT (Advanced Penetration Testing) course will prepare you to pass the rigorous test, which is considered by some industry experts to be one of the most challenging test of its kind.
Offensive Security is an IT certification company that focuses on Penetration Certificates. The exam consists of a real world situation that you have 24 hours to examine. The test measures your ability to gather information about the network, and then submit a detailed report with notes and screenshots to back up your findings. The test rewards points based on the difficulty of vulnerabilities you find, and their level of access. It's a tough practical exam but having this certification is definitely worth losing a night of sleep over if you want to become a successful penetration tester.
The OSCE exam is a doozy. It takes place over 48 hours and is an advanced certificate offered by Offensive Security. This test will really challenge you and prove that you are ready to do good work in the real world. The exam is tiring, but will show via practical methods that you know how to evade anti-virus software, use creative problem solving skills and identify vulnerabilities that might be hard for a lesser qualified ethical hacker to find. Stock up on coffee and get ready for one of the most rigorous tests in the industry.
Penetration Testing Career Paths
Any of these certificates will help you get started on the ethical hacker career path. If you're a beginner in the field, try starting with some of the easier ones and then work your way up to the ones that make you lose sleep for a day or two and prove that you're an expert. Keep in mind that while any certification is a positive addition to your resume, employers tend to favor practical certifications that show you truly know your stuff and can work under pressure. Sign up for any of Alpine Security's certification preparation courses to make sure you pass!
It is well known that careers in tech are a great path that could lead to a stable income and a thriving job history. Entry level penetration testers with some cybersecurity experience can start out at around $50,000 per year, which is a great starting salary, while the median salary for the field is about $82,000. Those later on in their careers will typically earn closer to $100,000 per year.
The career path of a penetration tester generally follows other IT and tech careers. You may start out in general IT, but then decide to specialize in pen testing by getting one of the aforementioned ethical hacking certifications, and work your way up to becoming a junior ethical hacker or penetration tester. Once you have proven yourself at that job, you can move into a more senior position involving challenging projects or managing those with less experience than you. Getting any of the previously described certifications can help you move onto the next step in your penetration testing career whether your title is penetration tester, vulnerability tester, security analyst or one of the many other titles in this exciting and relevant field.
Penetration testing, or “ethical hacking,” is a method of exposing and purposefully exploiting the security vulnerabilities of a company's systems. Unlike security tests that use automated programs to identify these vulnerabilities, penetration testing requires highly trained specialists to analyze the system, find its weaknesses, and use them to access protected information.
The human element of penetration testing is the most important. While a computer program can only perform the tasks with which it has been programmed, a human being can analyze new information and think of solutions that haven't been thought of before. What's more, a human is able to want – to feel a drive and a motivation that fuels the search for a way in.
Penetration Testing History - A Timeline
The concept of penetration testing has been around since human beings first began trying to understand their enemies' thought processes. Ancient armies all over the world conducted mock battles and games to figure out how other armies might undermine their strategies or get around their forces. This continued for centuries upon centuries until, inevitably, the tech world got in on the act.
The Tiger Teams
Penetration testing first became a concept in the 1960s. The burgeoning tech industry realized then that having multiple users on one system, as had become the norm, posed an inherent risk to the system's security.
This realization gave rise to what became known as “Tiger Teams.” Unsurprisingly, the first of these worked for the government and military. In 1971, the US Air Force ordered security testing of time-shared computer systems.
The 1980s
In 1984, the US Navy got in on the ethical hacking action when a team of Navy Seals worked to evaluate how easily terrorists could access different naval bases. Around the same time, the US government was starting to come down on illegal hackers. One result of this process was the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which specified that particular ethical hacking techniques were only allowed under a contract between hacker and client organization.
The 1990s
As hacking became more advanced, so did penetration testing. In 1995, Dan Farmer of Sun Microsystems and Wietse Venema of the Eindhoven University of Technology released a paper entitled “Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into It.”
Farmer and Venema described the emergence of the “uebercracker,” a hacker who had evolved beyond the ordinary and had learned to develop his own hacking programs. This person can discover bugs in the most advanced security systems and can get in and out of a system without leaving a trace. They showed rather than told the importance of a system owner's looking at his or her own system in the way a hacker might, thus laying the groundwork for contemporary penetration testing.
In the same year, John Patrick of IBM termed this process “ethical hacking.”
The 2000s
After the turn of the new millennium, penetration testing finally began to solidify as a discipline. In 2003, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) published its Testing Guide, which delineated the industry's first set of best practices. Six years later, the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) offered providers of penetration testing services with a set of common practices.
...And Today
In 2013, calculations revealed that spending on enterprise security had exceeded $6 billion. Skilled ethical hackers now have a marketplace that desperately needs what they are able to do, so long as employers continue to realize how important it is to stay secure against the smartest attackers.
Why Penetration Testing Matters
Systems and software are always changing, and new security protocols are evolving all the time. But a security system's advanced nature doesn't make it invulnerable; it just means that the system can now guard against attack types that have already happened.
Hackers are just as innovative and just as committed to effectiveness as the people who develop security systems. Companies need penetration testing to approach systems with this same determination and skill but without the intent to do actual harm to the organization.
Know Thine Enemy
Now that “data breach” has become a household term, threat detection, response, and prevention systems have become more in-depth across multiple industries. What is still missing from many such systems, however, is a specific knowledge of what these threats look like. We don't know how to make our systems stronger if we don't know where the weaknesses are.
This is where penetration testing comes in. By running simulated attacks and figuring out how a smart hacker could bypass existing security protocol, an organization can identify what parts of the system need strengthening, as well as how to respond effectively if a hacker does break through those barriers.
Identify the Real Threats
You may have heard about a certain attack vector or sequence of attack vectors. It might be possible to take that rumor as gospel and develop protections against those vectors, but who's to say that the actual threat might come from a different vector? Or even a different sequence of the same vectors?
An ethical hacker can check on the sequence that a company feels is most threatening and either
pinpoint where the threat is, or
determine that you should be more worried about a different vector entirely.
The same ethical hacker can also take a look at vulnerabilities that the company thought were not as threatening and figure out if a traditional hacker could combine them in a way that accesses the system.
Identify Cause and Effect
Penetration testing can help a company not only to identify how a hacker might access the system but also to see what the impacts could be on business operations. This information is invaluable to the development of a company's threat response and prevention strategy.
Penetration Testing Risks and Benefits
No process is perfect, and penetration testing does have its risks. Most of the risks, however, come from poorly conducted ethical hacking.
Readiness for Tests, Not Attacks
It's great for staff members to feel safe, but a company doesn't want them to get complacent. If their supervisor announces that they are doing penetration testing, the staff might fall into the trap of preparing for the test and then feeling overly secure when they pass.
The company could get around this by offering unannounced pen testing. These kinds of tests are only on the radar of upper management, so they get a better sense of how prepared a security staff actually is.
Potential Damage to a System
If a penetration testing professional doesn't have the proper training and experience, his or her attempts to access a system could cause the same damage as an actual attack. This includes:
sensitive data becoming compromised
servers crashing
systems becoming corrupted
These risks are also present if an ethical hacker isn't actually ethical at all. These people do exist, so companies have to be careful and hire only credentialed professional penetration testers.
Learn about the 7 Common Mistakes made when choosing a penetration testing company.
Start a Career in Penetration Testing
If you'd like to be one of the people that companies trust to perform penetration testing services, your first step is to pursue penetration testing training and secure an industry certification.
A good place to start is the CompTIA PenTest+ Certification. In preparing for this exam through Alpine Security, you can develop a strong working knowledge of ethical hacking. You will also build the management skills that you need to help companies not only identify their vulnerabilities but also strengthen weak areas. By studying the exploitation of multiple environments, from traditional desktop to the cloud, you can become the kind of professional that is truly in demand among security-conscious companies.
Alpine Security also offers training for the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) credential. The CEH certification exam is the most comprehensive in the industry, covering the 18 domains and 270 technologies that today's savvy hacker might use. You learn more than 2,200 popular hacking tools and experience in-depth attack situations in Alpine's state of the art simulation labs.
Both programs enable you to learn from working professionals who are in touch with the latest methods and concepts in ethical hacking. Each course includes an exam pass guarantee and an exam voucher so that you can be confident that you are getting skills that will truly prepare you for a career in ethical hacking. Don't put that career on hold – contact an Alpine representative today.
