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What is Penetration Testing?

An authorized simulated cyberattack on a system to evaluate its security defenses and identify vulnerabilities.

Penetration testing (pen testing) mimics real-world attacks to find security weaknesses before malicious actors do. Phases include reconnaissance, scanning, exploitation, post-exploitation, and reporting.

Types include black box (no knowledge), white box (full access), and gray box (partial knowledge). Tools include Metasploit, Burp Suite, Nmap, and OWASP ZAP. Regular pen testing is essential for security compliance and risk management.

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Vulnerability Scanning

Automated testing that identifies known security weaknesses in systems, applications, and network infrastructure.

CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery)

An attack that tricks authenticated users into submitting unwanted requests to a web application they are logged into.

Brute Force Attack

An attack method that systematically tries all possible combinations of passwords or keys until the correct one is found.

SAST (Static Application Security Testing)

Automated analysis of source code to find security vulnerabilities without executing the application.

A technique that controls the number of requests a client can make to a server within a specified time period.

CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing)

A browser security mechanism that controls which web domains can access resources from another domain via HTTP requests.

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