Planning for Penetration Testing

The decision to conduct penetration testing is an indication of the importance of risk management in any organization. It is a good professional practice to document security policies that outlines how penetration testing should be conducted and how it relates to different types of systems, such as servers, wen applications, laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones, and numerous others.

Penetration testing is also referred to as ethical hacking. Though both refer to the same concept, there is a difference between the two. Penetration testing is performed on a specific information system or as a specific objective while ethical hacking has a more broad objective, which includes all other hacking methods, and other activities to combat and mitigate cyber-attack. You can consider penetration testing as a subset of ethical hacking techniques. It suffices to say that an ethical hacker needs to have a more comprehensive knowledge of the hacking methodologies than a penetration tester.