Vendor agreements for penetration testing follow a structured framework that includes a Master Service Agreement, Statements of Work, and supporting documents like NDAs to govern each engagement. Understanding how these agreements work together ensures that scope, access, costs, and rules of engagement are clearly defined before testing begins.
Vendor Agreements & Pen Testing
Depending on what kind of relationship we have with a vendor, we may fill out different agreements or require different agreements. So what do those look like? Let's go over an example of a pentester and what agreements we may want to have when it comes to pen testing and working with us.
Just a reminder that pen testing is short for penetration testing, so this is hiring a company to come in and test out our network and our devices to see if there's vulnerabilities somewhere on our network. Because of the sensitivity of what this company is doing, we're going to really want to make sure that we're choosing the right company, one that can handle our network and our infrastructure securely.
Then we're going to go into the negotiation and contract phase, where we're going to start setting up an agreement with this vendor. Because of the sensitivity in nature, we're really going to want to make sure we nail down the requirements. Some considerations that will go into our requirements are going to be: what are our corporate policies, what are the facilities like, is there going to be some sort of physical security testing, is there some sort of compliance that we need to comply with. We're going to nail down those details and other details, but not all necessarily in this MSA.
The MSA, the master service agreement, is just going to have this overall how we're going to do business together. In this case right here we're going to probably have a non-disclosure agreement as part of the MSA, so the non-disclosure agreement will probably be worked into the master service agreement. We'll also probably have something like payment terms that are incorporated into that: how are we going to pay and what is the time frame in which we need to pay. And if there's any legal disputes, that goes into the MSA. This is just some of that general contracting terminology, and it all fits into the MSA.
We're just going to sign the MSA once with this company, and then that will be the governing policies from there on. It's not typical that we would sign an MSA for every single agreement or contract that we work on with this particular company. We would just sign one and it would be good from here until we need to do an update to the MSA.
Then what we have is we engage them. We have an engagement for whatever it is that we want them to do, and an engagement is just an arrangement to do something. So every time we want them to do something, then we would create what's called a statement of work.
You can think of it as the MSA being the overall contract of how we're going to work together, and then the SOWs are going to be set up for each of the engagements. Maybe this is going to happen on a yearly basis, or a quarterly basis, or just on an ad hoc basis. Whatever it is, we'll generate an SOW.
For each engagement, the statement of work really outlines what we expect them to do and what they expect of us. So it's really the scope of work, what the costs are going to be for this particular engagement, what the roles and responsibilities are going to be, and if there's any rules of engagement.
What are the assets? Are we going to hand over an asset inventory, or are they going to do an asset inventory as part of their pen testing? We're going to decide whether it's going to be invasive or non-invasive. We're going to get into the permissions and access: do we hand over access to them so they have access to the system, are they going to try to gain access into the system, or are they going to try to gain access into it and then use credentials that we give them to gain access? So we're going to hash out those details. And then a lot of times pen testing will have some sort of rescan for corrections, so we'll correct the issue and then they'll go in and do a rescan on whatever vulnerabilities that they found.
Invasive just means if they are going to really attack the system and really hit it hard. Because this could be a live environment, a production environment, if they're doing an invasive method of attacking this and trying to find those vulnerabilities, then that could be problematic to our customers. So maybe we want a non-invasive engagement this time, or maybe we want it to really fully test it out, in which case we're going to have them be very invasive into our system.
Those are the type of details that we really need to work out with this pen testing, and then it would all go into this statement of work.
Once we've signed the master service agreement and the statement of work, and anything else that we want to sign before we get this all kicked off, then we go into the actual engagement, where we're going to carry out the functions and they're going to do the pen testing. And then we close out the contract. The idea of a statement of work is that at some point in time we close out that statement of work.
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