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Penetration Testing Or Pen Testing Essay

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Penetration testing

Introduction: Penetration testing or Pen testing is to find the vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit a network, web application or a computer. It is generally an attack on a computer looking for security weaknesses, potentially gaining access to the computer 's features and data.
The main purpose of penetration testing is to determine the security weaknesses in a system. Pen testing can also be used to test an organization’s security policy agreement, its employees ' security awareness and the organization 's ability to identify and respond to security incidents. Pen tests are sometimes called as white hat attacks as the good guys are attempting to break in. Pen testing can be done by automated software applications or can be tested manually. In both ways, the process is same. Following are the strategies included in penetration testing:

Targeted testing
Performed by company’s IT team and pen testing team working together. Referred as “lights-turned-on” approach as everyone can see the test being carried out.
External testing
This testing will target on external devices or server including E-mail servers, domain name servers, web servers or firewalls. The objective is to find out how far outside attacker can get in when they’ve gained the access.

Internal testing
This test will simulate an inside attack behind the firewall done by an authorized user who is having standard access

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