As pen testers, we always seek methodology driven pen testing for discovering more vulnerabilities. Automated penetration testing can dramatically speed up the process of discovering more critical findings than traditional methods of pen testing. Makes work faster, easier, and more reliable. Harness powerful automation to make manual testing time count, accelerate testing workflows and boost the overall quality of the pen test.
With an exponential shift in the threat landscape, it’s important to stay ahead of the game and transform the traditional security ecosystem and level up with the latest skills, which will be the blend of human brain proficiency and potential of automation for improving the coverage while penetration testing. This blend of security model mitigates the risk with security recommendations and solutions to reinforce the ongoing information security operations.
Now let’s unlock the potential of automation tools and extensions leveraged for an effective vulnerability assessment and penetration testing engagement:
- Software vulnerability scanner: This is an extremely powerful burp suite plugin based on vulnerability databases of vulners.com. It has the capability of fingerprinting http response for spotting vulnerable versions operated by the target and also it will display cve, advisories and relevant exploits. This can reduce manual efforts and pull some time for other side channel attacks.
- Burp suite secret finder: This wonderful extension helps in discovery of sensitive and juicy information about api-keys, access tokens using regular expressions. Saving tons of tedious efforts for inspecting the whole lot of files manually. This will drastically increase the probability of encountering severe bugs with critical impact.
- JsDir: This is another magnificent extension for burp suite for extracting juicy hidden url paths in the depth of javascript files and it showcases the enumerated output in a beautified manner under the extension output tab. This saves the manual exercise of enumerating content and escalates the attack surface for more critical findings.
- Autorize: Autorize is the top notch extension for automatically authorization enforcement detection for burp suite. Autorize was designed to support security testers by carrying out automatic authorization tests. It can also perform various automatic authentication tests. With the advantage of interception filter, it allows configuring domains to be intercepted by autorize plugin, while leveraging the power of blacklist, whitelist, regex in order to avoid unnecessary domains to be intercepted by autorize and work more organized.
- Upload scanner: The ultimate scanner for fuzzing file parsers for a variety of file upload extensions with automated probing the application. Various techniques are necessary to successfully upload a file, including correlation of file extensions, content types, and content. Moreover, the file content has to pass server-side checks or modifications such as image size requirements or resizing operations. Circumventing processing on the server side, creating content that survives the modification or creating content that results in the desired payload after the modification is another goal of this extension.
The crucial point of focus for this blog post is to acknowledge the robustness of automated tools to be in pen tester’s arsenal. This not only polishes the productivity of pentesting workflow, Also it reaches out to further grounds for positive results and the outcome is maximized when intense penetration testing is executed. The movement to adopt automation tools and extensions ensures that the risks are interpreted and take the edge off the explicit threat landscape.
