Valency Networks uses a highly technical and methodical approach to form a checklist. Each customer has a different checklist because their networks and scenario's are different. Also each networks' security requirements are different. At a high level, we take into account the following items to perform a network vulnerability assessment followed by a detailed network penetration testing of IT infrastructure.

  • Information gathering
  • Network port scanning
  • Perform fingerprinting
  • Perform vulnerability scanning
  • Identify hosts and footprint
  • Perform OS detection
  • Enumerate services
  • Find insecure services
  • Find insecure databases and components
  • Exploit vulnerabilities
Network Vulnerability Pentesting Security Testing Services, Network VAPT Checklist

Network Security Testing Process:

Before Testing Starts

  • Sign NDA

  • Freeze on scope

  • Study Cloud App Architecture

  • Study Cloud User Roles

  • Decide attack vectors and prioritize

  • Allocate single point of contact

During Testing

  • Black box testing

  • Gray box testing

  • Automatic and Manual Testing

  • Testing Phases

  • Reconnaissance

Ethical Hacking

  • Scanning

  • Gaining Access

  • Maintaining Access

  • Covering Tracks

  • Gathering Logs

After Testing

  • Analyse logs

  • Confirm results

  • Apply Knowledge

  • Apply Experience

  • Repeat Test if required

Testing Outcome

  • Detailed technical report

  • Executive summary

  • High level fixation solutions

  • ISO27001:2013 Compliance


Network Pentesting Tools

Valency Networks uses highly technical industry standard tools to perform vulnerability scanning, vulnerability assessment and the network penetration testing. While the tools certainly add value in saving time and automating the process, primarily a manual testing approach is used.

A team of certified experts capture logs, analyze those and corroborate the vulnerabilities. This is done to mimic real life hackers, thus further increasing the accuracy of the results. Following a high level list of tools that we use in network pentesting.

  • Kali Linux tools
  • Nmap scanner
  • Retina scanner
  • Nessus scanner
  • Nexpose scanner
  • NSE scripts
  • Telnet and other TCPIP tools
  • Packet crafters and injectors

For a more elaborate list of network VAPT tools, feel free to refer to this page.


Network VAPT Report

Penetration Testing, Security Audit

Our report makes us one of the best network security pentesting companies. This is because it carries simplicity, avoids jargon and yet provides a highly technical material pertaining to solutions. Our VAPT report is different than others because it is not an outcome of a tool, but a combination of logs, tools output and manual pentesting efforts carried out. Below are some features of our network VAPT report.

  • Executive summary to narrate the report for senior management
  • Detailed technical vulnerability description for network experts to understand
  • Detailed network security fixation steps for network engineers to perform fixation
  • Vulnerabilities categorized into Critical, High and Low severities
  • Reference links and videos pointing to aid in the fixation process
  • Sent in a confidential manner to protect privacy

Click here to see a sample report of vulnerability assessment


What are the 5 reasons to network security problem?

Unknown Assets on the Network
Many businesses these days fail to keep a complete inventory of all the IT assets that they own and are tied into their network. This causes a massive problem.

Abuse of User Account Privileges
According to data cited by the Harvard Business Review, "60% of all attacks were carried out by insiders." Whether it's because of honest mistakes (accidentally sending information to the wrong recipients or losing a work device), intentional data breaches and privilege escalation, or any social engineering attacks that compromise the users account data, the people in the organization/ business represent one of the greatest security threats.

Since these threats are from trusted or known users and systems, they're also the hardest to identify and stop.

Unpatched Security Vulnerabilities
Many businesses are concerned with "zero day" exploits. These exploits include unknown issues with security in programs and systems that are not yet been used against anyone. However, zero-day vulnerabilities aren't the actual problem-unpatched known vulnerabilities are the problem.

Attackers usually implement known exploits. In fact, as noted in an online article, "The Verizon Data Breach Report 2016 revealed that out of all detected exploits, most came from vulnerabilities dating to 2007. Next was 2011." In fact, Vulnerabilities that are almost a decade old have been accounted for most of the breaches.

A Lack of Defense in Depth
In spite of all best security practices, there can still be a day where the hacker succeeds in breaching your network security. However, the damage the attacker will be capable of depends on how the network is structured. Businesses that have an open network structure are at great risk, because once an attacker is inside an open network, they have free access to all systems on the network.

Not Enough IT Security Management
Many companies now face this issue of not having enough people in place to properly manage the best cybersecurity solutions which are put in place. Due to this, critical cybersecurity alerts get missed, and successful attacks gets eliminated in time to reduce damage.

What is the difference between public and private networks?

The basic difference between public and private networks are:

Public networks are accessible by everyone and anyone where as a private network is only accessible by authorized persons. The best example for a public network is Internet and that of a private network is corporate network.

The private network is owned by a single organization and is accessible only by the organization's employees within the organization. This is possible due to the gateway routers that exist between the public and private networks. In case of any intruders from public network, the firewall restricts the entry.

What is the most alarming security issues in the internet nowadays?

Phishing is the most alarming security issue prevailing in organization and many have fallen prey to it. Statistics say, 85% of all organizations have been hit my phishing attack in the past year 2020. Phishing commonly takes place in organizations through spoofed emails. Employees respond to these phishing emails by either clinking on the link provided or downloading malicious file attachments, thinking it is from a legitimate source. Phishing attack in organizations can lead to reputational, intellectual property, and monetary losses.

What are the security issues in networking?

  1. DDoS
  2. Data Breaches
  3. Malicious Insider
  4. Malware Injection

Is network security key same as password?

Yes, Network security key is similar to a password. It is a password used to connect to a wireless network and is also known as a WiFi or wireless network password. Every access point comes with a predefined network security key that needs to be changed by the user. On failing to do so can result in data breach as can get access to the network on entering the default access point password/ security key.

What is the best network security?

Listed below are security practices to be followed to achieve network security:

  • Performing security audit and mapping
  • Keeping the network patched.
  • Physically securing the network.
  • Implementing MAC address filtering.
  • Implementing VLANs to segregate traffic.
  • Using 802.1X for authentication.
  • Using VPNs to encrypt select PCs or servers.
  • Encrypting the entire network.

Why is network security needed?

Network security is essential to protect the personal data of clients existing on network and to facilitate protection of information that is shared between computers on the network. Having a secure network can prevent hacking attempts or virus / spyware attacks from the internet as the primary goal of network security is Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. To maintain secure platform for computers, users, and programs, network security is important to protect networking infrastructure from unauthorized access, misuse, malfunction, modification, destruction, or improper disclosure.

What are the 4 types of IT security ?

Every organization has some data to protect. The data, if stolen can cause huge damage to an organization both reputational and financial. Hence, it becomes vital to secure all the paths via which one can access data.

Here is when IT Security comes in play. It is nothing but deploying strategies that can guarantee end to end security to protect the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of data whether it is in transit or at rest.

  1. Application Security:
    With almost entire population being dependant on one or the other kind of application to get their job done, it has really become important to tighten the security around them. Applications can be of any kind such as Websites, Mobile apps, Cloud hosted apps so on and so forth.

    It is always better to introduce security way early into the development of application rather than doing it later. It is also important to do the timely evaluation of your application against vulnerabilities.

  2. Network Security:
    Once the attacker is in your network, there is no way to stop him from doing the damage. Hence, network security both internal and external becomes crucial to the well-being of an organization. It makes sure to restrict access to only those who are supposed to be accessing the network.

    A detail vulnerability scan of your network can help analyse the loose points one can exploit.

  3. Cloud Security:
    Cloud came as a blessing to many organizations who were investing in a great deal of resources just to maintain servers. It helped a lot organizations strengthen their Business Continuity Plans. With organizations moving their entire data to the cloud, it has become a favourite target of attackers.

    It is vital to configure cloud securely and in the best interest of the business. There have been recent cases where in AWS S3 buckets were leaked and lot of data was gone due to making them accessible to public. A cloud access security broker can be used tighten the cloud security.

  4. Internet Security:
    It involves protecting the data that is coming in and going out of your device, browser etc. It makes sure that the data is not altered or spoofed and thus maintains the integrity. This can be achieved by encrypting the data in transit out of many solutions. Firewalls can be used and deployed on the device to filter out the traffic that could pose a harm to the security of the data.

What are cyber security risks?

Cyber security risk is a risk that could potentially harm the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data through an attack either on asset, network or an application.

Most common cyber security risks are as below

  • Ransomware: The ransomware attack has been active for a while. It has a potential to do great volumes of damage to an organization. A lot of organizations have gone bankrupt and had to shut down their businesses.
    The attack involves encrypting data on the machine. The data is held hostage until some price demanded by an attacker is paid.
  • Phishing: It is a kind of a social engineering attack which involves persuading someone to click on a malicious link to steal credentials and data. This attacks are very well crafted and can be spread through email attachments, links.
    Awareness plays an important role here. It is important to verify the source of a message, email before downloading or clicking on anything.
  • Man in the middle attack: The attacks involves hijacking an active communication between two systems or two entities. Once hijacked, an attacker can either steal the information that is being shared or he can modify or alter the content affecting its integrity.
    Some of the ways to prevent would be to encrypt the data in transit by using stronger encryption algorithm, enforce https and making sure that only private network is used for communication and exchange of data.
  • SQL injection: Since database has its own language, this attacks makes use of carefully crafted SQL queries to interact with backend database and fetch data from it. It is crucial to filter the data that is being injected into input fields so as to make it avoid interact with the database.
  • DDOS attack: This attack attempts to overwhelm the target with constant flow of requests either from one or different sources. The end goal is to make target slow and unavailable to people using it.

What is network VAPT?

  • Network VAPT is a type of security testing that can be done either manually or by using tools to ensure that the network is not exhibiting any means of evasion.
  • Vulnerability Assessment involves finding security holes i.e. vulnerabilities by scanning the entire network.
  • Penetration Testing involves exploiting the found vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to the network.
More info can be found here: Network Security VAPT

How do you perform a network VAPT test ?

Network VAPT can be done in two ways, manual and automatic by using tools. To ensure the security of a network, it should be scanned thoroughly both internally and externally.

Network includes of all the network devices such as firewalls, switches, routers and all the devices that are connected within a network or outside.

A detailed assessment can shed light on the unwanted ports that are open, unsupported firmware, unpatched systems, poorly configured firewall rules, outdated software version, weak password policy so on and so forth.

Once the vulnerabilities are found, they can be further exploited to see the extent of damage they can do to the organization. This step is to be done very carefully since wrongfully executed test can do more harm than good to the network.

More info can be found here: Network Security VAPT

Does VAPT increases ROI on IT security?

It is said that the value of an asset is determined by the value of data being hosted by it. More critical the data, more critical the asset.

To ensure safety of the data, it is important to secure the asset first. This can be done by calculating the risks and its impact if they were exploited. Vulnerability Assessment does just the same. It analyses the asset be it a network asset such as firewall or a simple asset such as desktop for underlying risks and fixes it before an attacker can reach to them.

Timely assessment of vulnerabilities can help an organization decide which vulnerabilities to prioritize first based on the harm they can cause to a system. A good amount of investment in quality tools and skilled manpower now can tremendously benefit an organization in a long run.

This can also benefit an organization in gaining new customers and clients. VAPT builds a certain level of confidence among the organization due to a good sense and understanding of how far an organization is when it comes to security.

How pentesting differs in various operating systems?

Different operating systems are based upon different ideologies. Linux based operating systems like Kali, Pentoo Linux, Backbox Linux are specifically made with certain inbuilt tools, which helps the pen testers to works easily and with better grasp. On the other hand, Operating systems like Windows or OS X were mainly developed on the basis of user-friendly Graphical User Interface(GUI) based features, which helps a normal user to a great extent but restricts the developers/pen testers to scan/ access their system. But with time, different scanning tools like Nessus have been developed in all possible environments but still, it becomes more help for the pen testers to work on the command line on Linux based environments.

On the other hand, unlike Windows or Mac, Linux is open source. That implies the source code of OS is open and available to everyone. Hence anyone can change and manipulate it to gain more access and more vulnerability to the system and also deploy controls to avoid the same. That leads to the point that environments like Linux are more transparent, the developers at Microsoft works hard to make it impossible for anyone outside to understand the inner workings of the operating system hence making it hard for the pen testers to work on it.

Above all, it becomes pretty clear that every environment has its own advantages, but for pen testing, Linux environments are more preferable over the other present OS in the market due to universalistic nature and opensource availability. But still, various tools are available in cross-platform basis providing similar experience making the work of pen testers easier.


Our Culture

Valency Networks is a very agile, friendly and fun loving atmosphere and yet we maintain a cutting edge technical vibrant work environment.