reportpenetration-testingsecurity

What does "assumptions" refer to when writing a pentest report?


I have to write the "assumptions" part of a pentest report and I am having trouble understanding what I should write. I checked multiple pentest reports (from https://github.com/juliocesarfort/public-pentesting-reports) but none of them had this paragraph.
Also I found this explanation "In case there are some assumptions that the pen-tester considers before or during the test, the assumptions need to be clearly shown in the report. Providing the assumption will help the report audiences to understand why penetration testing followed a specific direction.", but still what I do have in mind it is more suited for "attack narative".
Can you provide me a small example (for one action, situation) so I can see exactly how it should be written?


Solution

  • I would think the "assumptions" paragraph and the "Attack narrative" paragraph are somehow overlapping. I would use the "Assumptions" paragraph to state a couple of high level decisions made before starting the attack, with whatever little information the pentester would have on the attack. I would expand on the tools and techniques used in the "Attack narrative" paragraph

    For example an assumption could be: "The pentester is carrying on the exercise against the infrastructure of a soho company with less than 5 people It is common for soho companies to use consumer networking equipment that is usually unsecure, and left configured as defualt. For this reason the attacker focused on scanning for http and ssh using a database of vendors default username and passwords"