4 ms·

One of the most important aspects of a long report is the prioritization of the contents.

by cestith 10y ago

Liuser 10y ago
I used to pentest for a living. Still do some red team exercises every now and then, but far less now that I'm mainly blueteam focused. I personally organized my report into three sections, which seemed to work well. Clients seemed to enjoy the formatting: 1. Executive - Summarize everything in one page at a high level. You could skim it fast if you chose to. Highlight potential negative business impact of each finding. 2. Management - A little more detailed. 2-3 pages max. Most severe findings at the top and recommended action for remediation. 3. Narrative - This is the bulk 80-90% of the report detailing your step by step process including screenshots so that if someone wanted to duplicate your findings they could.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  The last (and only) pen test report I saw had some "escalation of such and such via this vague vector, please do x and y to close off this avenue" - strongly implying that they felt the actual trick being used was their IP to be protected? This was for using citrix boxes to provide saas to a client
spc476 10y ago
About a decade ago (give or take a year) our small web company had a PCI test against our network and a 500-page PDF ended up in my email. The "report" was obviously the vomit of a program detailing every issue for every site [1]. You would think that after the 50th time our DNS resolvers were "open to the public" (as it were) that the stupid program vomiting the report would realize it's reported the same DNS resolvers each time. [1] It didn't help my perception of the report when it screamed that "ICMP echo was enabled and nefarious scalawags might be able to do unspeakable acts against our computers, best cut the network cable" type of advice [2] (yes, I know port 443 is open! WE'RE A WEB HOSTING COMPANY SERVING UP COMMERCIAL WEBSITES! ARE YOU PCI AUDITORS STUPID?) [2] Okay, the ICMP echo thing was reported, but did not need to be disabled to pass the audit. If so, why even bring it up?

One of the most important aspects of a long report is the prioritization of the contents.

by cestith 10y ago

One of the most important aspects of a long report is the prioritization of the contents.

I used to pentest for a living. Still do some red team exercises every now and then, but far less now that I'm mainly blueteam focused. I personally organized my report into three sections, which seemed to work well. Clients seemed to enjoy the formatting: 1. Executive - Summarize everything in one page at a high level. You could skim it fast if you chose to. Highlight potential negative business impact of each finding. 2. Management - A little more detailed. 2-3 pages max. Most severe findings at the top and recommended action for remediation. 3. Narrative - This is the bulk 80-90% of the report detailing your step by step process including screenshots so that if someone wanted to duplicate your findings they could.

Ntrails 10y ago
The last (and only) pen test report I saw had some "escalation of such and such via this vague vector, please do x and y to close off this avenue" - strongly implying that they felt the actual trick being used was their IP to be protected? This was for using citrix boxes to provide saas to a client

spc476 10y ago

About a decade ago (give or take a year) our small web company had a PCI test against our network and a 500-page PDF ended up in my email. The "report" was obviously the vomit of a program detailing every issue for every site [1]. You would think that after the 50th time our DNS resolvers were "open to the public" (as it were) that the stupid program vomiting the report would realize it's reported the same DNS resolvers each time. [1] It didn't help my perception of the report when it screamed that "ICMP echo was enabled and nefarious scalawags might be able to do unspeakable acts against our computers, best cut the network cable" type of advice [2] (yes, I know port 443 is open! WE'RE A WEB HOSTING COMPANY SERVING UP COMMERCIAL WEBSITES! ARE YOU PCI AUDITORS STUPID?) [2] Okay, the ICMP echo thing was reported, but did not need to be disabled to pass the audit. If so, why even bring it up?