5 Phases of Ethical Hacking/Penetration Testing 👨‍💻 🖲

Reconnaissance/ Footprinting: It’s the first phase of penetration testing. Here, the security researcher collects information about the target. It can be done actively or passively or both. It helps security firm gather information about the target system, network components, active machines, etc. ✍️ 🌎

Scanning: The scanning phase is rather tool oriented than being performed manually. The tester runs one or more scanner tools to gather more information about the target by using various scanners such as war dialers, ns lookup, port scanners , network mappers and vulnerability scanners. The penetration tester collects as many vulnerabilities as possible.☣️🔎

Gaining Access: In the gaining access phase, the penetration tester tries to establish a connection with the target and exploit the vulnerabilities found in the previous phase. The exploitation may be a denial of service attacks, session hijacking, and many more. 🥷🕵

Maintaining Access: In the maintaining access phase, the penetration tester tries to create a backdoor for himself. It helps him to identity hidden vulnerabilities in the system while allowing him to come back to the system to retrieve more data further on.⌛️⏳️

Clear Tracks: The most important part of hacking. In the clearing tracks phase, the tester tries to remove all logs and footprints which might help the administrator identify his presence. This helps the tester to think like a hacker and perform corrective actions to mitigate those activities.🧼

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