Penetration Testing Training

2 great training courses for pen testing are done by SANS and Offensive Security. If you are working in IT security and are interested in learning new skills or if you are starting out in pentesting, these courses are both worth your effort to look at.

SANS Security 560: Network Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking.

This is a course that is taugh at the bigger SANS conferences by Ed Skoudis. Ed also wrote the material for the course. He works for InGuardians, which is an information security firm in DC. He is one of the top security guys out there and you can tell from the course. This course goes over the whole pentesting process, from start to finish. From getting a pentest gig to turning in the final report to your client. Very good information on preparation, recon, as well as in depth technical skills to penetrate systems. I took the mentor course and found it to be very informational and provided lab access to practice what you learn and even a capture the flag exercise at the end. I highly recommend this training course, whether it be at a SANS conference or by other delivery means, such as Mentor.

Offensive Security: Penetration testing with Backtrack

This next training course, I am currently going through, and I am impressed so far. Pentesting with Backtrack (PWB) is a course developed from the creators of Backtrack, themselves. You get connectivity to laps, so you can run the tools in Backtrack, scan, exploit and revert VM if you need. You use your downloaded instance of Backtrack to go through the course and I can say that it is very in-depth. You are given videos explaining the teaching and labs/exercises. You also get a document with all the course information to go along with the videos. This training is all hands on, with steps such as recon, scanning, even some exploit creation all using the suite of tools provided in Backtrack. Backtrack is such a huge tool to pentesters, so this course is very essential training. The site has reviews from those of HD Moore, Kevin Mitnick and others. I am going through the Online version of this training but there is also an in class course.

I hope to post some videos from my own research and work with the skills learned in these both courses. Penetration testing is very important to test your security controls. It gives you real insight into your security posture and what you should really be concerned with.