Proper planning and preparation is key to a successful penetration test. It is definitely not as exciting as some of the tasks we will do within the penetration test later, but it will lay the foundation of the penetration test. There are a lot of moving parts to a penetration test, and you need to make sure that you stay on the correct path and know just how far you can and should go. The last thing you want to do in a penetration test is cause a customer outage because you took down their application server with an exploit test (unless, of course, they want us to get to that depth) or scanned the wrong network. Performing any of these actions would cause our penetration-testing career to be a rather short-lived one.
In this chapter, the following topics will be covered:
- Why does penetration testing take place?
- Scoping meeting, stakeholder questionnaire, and documentation
- Building the systems for the penetration test
- Penetration system software setup
