Chapter 21. Speeding up Penetration Testing

"If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough" - Mario Andretti

While performing a penetration test, it is very important to monitor time constraints. A penetration test that consumes more time than expected can lead to loss of faith, cost that exceeds the budget, and many other things. In addition, this might cause an organization to lose all of its business from the client in the future.

In this chapter, we will develop methodologies to conduct fast-paced penetration testing with automation tools and approaches in Metasploit. We will learn about the following topics:

• Automating post exploitation
• Speeding up exploit writing
• Speeding up payload generation using the social engineering toolkit

This automation testing strategy will not only decrease the time of testing but will also decrease the cost-per-hour-per-person too.