Chapter 2: Pentesting and Ethical Hacking

The following chapter discusses penetration testing, also known as pentesting. Pentesting is something that grew out of computer concerns during the 1960s. As computer systems began to distribute data more, ensuring the security of that data became crucial. After much discussion of how communication lines could be penetrated, it was recommended that some type of "penetration assessment" be used to assess computer systems and communication lines with "real threat-like" assessments. Moving forward to the early 1970s, tiger teams were created as the first penetration testing teams and carried out operations similar to the tactics you will see and read about in this book. The primary responsibility of these tiger teams was to discover vulnerabilities and assess the threat impact level based on manually exploiting the vulnerabilities found.

Fast-forward to today, and the world of pentesting is growing in popularity and is...