Penetration Tester
Job Description
This expert analyzes how intruders breached the infrastructure in order to identify additional systems/networks that have been compromised. Investigating traces left by complex attacks requires a forensic expert who is not only proficient in the latest forensic, response, and reverse engineering skills, but is astute in the latest exploit methodologies.
Why It’s Cool
“In the private world, the security guy just cleans up the mess to try and keep the ship afloat, but when criminals strike, the crime investigator gets to see that the bad guys go to jail. Want to see the face of your enemy...behind bars? It’s a thrill like no other – being pitted against the mind of the criminal and having to reconstruct his lawless path.”
How It Makes a Difference
“You are what stands between your organization and the hackers/malware out there.”
“This is a core job that provides nuts and bolts technical security controls for any enterprise. When things go wrong, this is the person that we all need to ask for help. They are the ones that will be able to look at the more esoteric logs and determine what happened, write a script to deal with problems, etc.”
How to Be Successful
Having mastered, intrusion prevention/detection, computer forensics, hacker exploit techniques, and some reverse engineering of malware, this forensics expert thinks there is always more to learn and actively seeks out new learning opportunities daily.
Attend training, conferences, and summits that focus on methodologies described below. Listen to the latest podcasts discussing recent events. Use your blog reader to pull articles automatically found on Websites that focus on discussing the latest trends.
Stay abreast of the latest attack methodologies. How are attackers breaking into networks? Keep up to date on the latest attacker, pen testing, and red-team methodologies. Learn how to track an attacker across multiple system and technologies.
Stay ahead of the curve on the latest forensic and incident response methodologies.
In addition to traditional forensic methodologies, you need to master live data analysis and collection. Learn how to examine volatile data and collect it effectively. Learn how to identify personal identifiable information and payment card information quickly.
Get familiar with techniques that enable you to quickly analyze malware found on your network using reverse engineering, network analysis, and digital forensics.
A skilled investigator can examine malware and network signatures to create malware indicators that are deployed within an organization’s network and systems in order to discover additional systems that may have been breached.
