Question

How may intelligence gathering during penetration testing impact the operations of an organization?

Answer 1

Intelligence gathering during penetration testing impact the operations of an organization, since:

Penetration testing:

• It is the forced entry to a network using all possible methods to test the security and to find the vulnerabilities of the system. Usually the penetration test for intelligence gathering is done without much information from client, only basic details are gathered and tries to find critical details through security vulnerabilities of the network or system.

It affects the normal operation of organization;

• The intelligence gathering is actually done without the knowledge of low level workers or employees and the test will affect their proper working by crashing the servers, band width and net speed reduce, etc.
• The critical data may lose by improper penetration test results in big operational problem.
• Can’t trust the testing agency fully, so the critical information sharing needs to be hold at the testing period will be a problem.
• Since the testing is carried out in a realistic situation, the security breaches and abnormal behaviors may alert the employees and they may perform securing actions that will affect both the security testing and operation of the organization.