A penetration test, also sometimes referred to as a pen test or a vulnerability assessment, is the term given to a simulated cyber-attack on a computer system that is intended to test out potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers.
Penetration testing is often used for the purpose of augmenting web application firewalls regarding web application security and website security.
Penetration testing often involves trying to breach a variety of different application systems such as frontend or backend servers and application protocol interfaces to find such vulnerabilities, including the likes of unsanitized inputs which could be vulnerable to code injection attacks.
WAF security policies can then be finetuned by the insights that the penetration test is able to provide, as can patch issues found during vulnerability testing.
The Different Stages of Penetration Testing
There are normally five different stages to a penetration test:
- Planning and…