5 stages of Penetration Testing Program in USA

Before heading towards the stages of penetration testing program directly, we must understand the basic concept of a penetration test. What is it? What is its purpose? Does it involve a single or many methods for the execution? These and many alike questions might pop up in your mind when you ever come across the term “Penetration Testing Program.” We are here to answer all these questions.

What is Penetration Testing?
It is an imitated cyberattack that helps in checking out the vulnerabilities of your computer system. In USA, penetration testing program is usually used in the context of web application security – augmentation of a web application firewall (WAF) particularly.

Penetration testing is exclusive that can be carried out in five ways.
I. Internal Testing
II. External Testing
III. Blind Testing
IV. Double Blind Testing
V. Targeted Testing

Stages of Penetration Testing Program
After a brief introduction to it, we discuss the five stages of a Penetration Testing Program.

1. In USA, the scope and goals of the test are defined first off. It includes all the systems and methods to be used throughout the process. After that, the intelligence is gathered for better understanding and execution of the testing program.

2. The next step involves two kinds of analysis (static and dynamic) for understanding the response of applications to various intrusion attempts.

3. At this stage, web application attacks like SQL injection, backdoors, cross-site scripting are used to know the vulnerabilities of a target. And then, these testers escalate privileges, steal data, and even cease/interrupt traffic to understand how badly these vulnerabilities may cause damage.

4. Now, the testers maintain access to that exploited system to know how long enough a vulnerability may last in the system. The basic idea of which is to imitate some advanced threats that’ll remain in the system for a few months for stealing organization’s sensitive data.

5. All the results are now compiled into a detailed report including the exploited vulnerabilities, the sensitive data accessed, and the time spent in that overall penetration testing process.

In USA, a Penetration Testing Program is basically laid out to find application security solutions for providing protection against future attacks.