Chapter 5: Situational Awareness – Mapping Out the Homefield Using Graph Databases

A penetration test starts with an initial reconnaissance phase. This is where the basic open source intelligence is gathered and information about the target is retrieved in (mostly) non-offensive ways. As part of leveraging our homefield advantage, we can gather external and internal metadata about systems to build out a view of the homefield upfront that will benefit a large number of teams across the organization.

This can be done as a joint effort across the organization. This means the red, blue, and other service teams can collaborate to build the best possible view of the homefield. A great way to represent this information is via a graph database using technologies such as Apache TinkerPop, TinkerGraph, OrientDB, and Neo4j, to name a few, but you can also leverage a relational SQL database. Some database systems such as Microsoft SQL Server offer both relational and graph capabilities...