JoWUA

Abstract

The nature and size of global corporate IT infrastructure have grown at a staggering rate, creating demand for more advanced virtualization and security tool sets to mitigate strategic security gaps and vulnerabilities. This paper focuses on the safety and efficacy of Reconnaissance and Vulnerability Discovery Lock Agents (RV-DLA) within the Harbor-Lock pen-testing tool, tailored for enterprise environments. Harbor-Lock combines multiple pen testing methodologies and automates the process to streamline network security assessments of large, multilayered environments. RV-DLA is the main component of Harbor-Lock, performing operational reconnaissance and, for a limited period, discovering system vulnerabilities with minimal perturbation to the operational system. This paper examines the effectiveness of RV-DLA agents in diverse enterprise environments and measures safety in terms of operational perturbation of system stability, performance, and data integrity. The findings indicate that RV-DLA has a high Rate of Correct Discovery (RCD) for critical vulnerabilities, including zero-day, sensitive, and/or misconfiguration issues, with an extremely low false discovery rate. Safety assessment indicates significant improvement in managing system disruptions and data corruption, thereby striking a unique balance in enterprise environments. The study reports 90% asset coverage, 20% high-vulnerability rate, 8% false-positive rate, 20% exploitability validation rate, and 18% repeat-finding rate. This paper discusses the strategic Strengths and Weaknesses of implementing Harbor-Lock with RV-DLA agents for enterprise-level penetration testing to integrate Cybersecurity workflows and propose possible ends to the ongoing imbalance of enterprise-level testing tools and practices.