What is penetration testing?
The term "penetration tester" is an interesting job title for a professional to have. While the job title may be a good conversation starter, and despite the funny remarks, penetration testing can be one of the most rewarding careers within cybersecurity. So, what is penetration testing, or pentesting?
Penetration testing is the evaluation of a system's attack surface through manual and automated exploitation. This involves using multiple sources to discover and exploit issues within systems. A system is a set of people, mechanisms, software, and policies that make up an entity (system).
Another way we can look at it is that pentesting highlights how systems work and reveals the vulnerabilities that leave them exposed to hacking, enabling the vulnerabilities to be corrected before adversaries can exploit them. This gives personnel an understanding of their technology, its security, and how attackers think about and exploit such systems...
