It's not much of a penetration test, imho, if the "attackers" have detailed knowledge of your network and systems before the attack. You should determine what kind of a scenario you are trying to simulate, and how the results will be used to improve security. Is this a "black box" situation, where you want to see what potential attackers can discover about your systems without insider information? Or will this be a step by step, examine each part of the system and then step back to see what's going on from a high level scenario? If you're trying to both reduce vulnerabilities and your attack profile, I would go for the black box approach and see what your pentesters can come up with themselves. Man is a resourceful creature, and you never know what they could turn up. Q On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 8:52 AM, Green, Timothy <Timothy.Green@mantech.com>wrote:
Howdy all,
I'm a Security Manager of a large network, we are conducting a Pentest next month and the testers are demanding a complete network diagram of the entire network. We don't have a "complete" network diagram that shows everything and everywhere we are. At most we have a bunch of network diagrams that show what we have in various areas throughout the country. I've been asking the network engineers for over a month and they seem to be too lazy to put it together or they have no idea where everything is.
I've never been in this situation before. Should I be honest to the testers and tell them here is what we have, we aren't sure if it's accurate; find everything else? How would they access those areas that we haven't identified? How can I give them access to stuff that I didn't know existed?
What do you all do with your large networks? One huge network diagram, a bunch of network diagrams separated by region, or both? Any pentest horror stories?
Thanks,
Tim
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