What is Penetration Testing in Cyber Security 2025

Penetration testing, also called pen testing, describes processes, tools, and services designed and implemented to simulate attacks and data breaches and find security vulnerabilities. You can run a pentest on a computer system, an entire network, or a web application.

The primary aim of a pentest is to identify vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. There are various ways through which the identified vulnerabilities can be discovered. You can choose either manual pen tests, executed by a team of white hat hackers, or automated penetration testing, carried out by a software solution. Curious to learn more? Let’s dive in!

What are the Benefits of Penetration Testing?​

Ideally, software and systems were designed to avoid hazardous security vulnerabilities in the design. A pen test shows how close it came to achieving that goal. Pen testing can help an organization in these ways:

• Find weaknesses in systems
• Determine the robustness of controls
• Support compliance with data privacy and security regulations (e.g., PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR)
• Provide qualitative and quantitative examples of the current security posture and budget priorities for management

Penetration Testing Process​

The penetration testing involves the following five fundamental stages:

• Planning: Identify and define the testing objective and scope. Collect intelligence information on the target, how the target works, and possible weaknesses.
• Scanning: Use the static and/or dynamic analysis of the network. This information allows the pentester to know how the application responds to various threats.
• Gaining Access: Identify the vulnerabilities in the target application using penetration testing techniques, such as cross-site scripting and SQL injection.
• Maintaining Access: Ascertain a criminal’s ability to retain access, owing to a vulnerability that has been exploited, and become privy to deeper forms of access.
• Analyzing: Assessing the penetration test’s results in a report describing vulnerabilities exploited, sensitive data accessed, and the timing of the response from the system during the penetration test.

Penetration Testing Methods​

Let’s dive deeper into penetration testing methods that ethical hackers use to uncover vulnerabilities effectively.

1. External testing​

External penetration tests target the assets of a company that is visible on the internet, for example, the web application itself, the company website and email, as well as domain name servers (DNS). The goal is to gain access to valuable data.

2. Internal testing​

In an internal test, a tester who has access to the backside of an application behind its firewall simulates the attack of a malicious insider. This is not necessarily simulating a rogue employee. An ordinary starting scenario may be a worker whose ID and password were stolen because of a phishing attack.

3. Blind testing​

In a blind test, only the name of the enterprise that is under attack is given to the tester. This provides security personnel with a real-time view of how an actual application assault would occur.

4. Double-blind testing​

Security personnel do not know what kind of simulated attack will occur in a double-blind test. Just as in the real world, they would have no idea when their defenses were about to be tested before a breach attempt occurred.

5. Targeted testing​

In this given condition, both the penetration tester and security personnel collaborate with each other and keep one another informed of their actions. It is very useful training in which a security team gets real-time feedback from a hacker’s point of view.