Penetration Testing Courses

What is penetration testing?

Penetration testing, colloquially known as pen testing or a pen test, is a way of checking an organisation or companies cybersecurity by running a false attack on their systems. Penetration testing services can be done on specific operating systems or adapted for a web application to test wireless networks. Penetration testing can be a form of ethical hacking, where information security systems are analysed by a penetration tester to discover weaknesses and flaws.

Why study penetration testing?

Security testing for any organisation is crucial, because without secure servers, operating systems and security controls, people won’t trust their company to keep their information safe. Understanding how to do these tests and analyse the data takes time and experience, which is difficult to get without a course. In a course in penetration testing you may:

• Discover penetration testing tools and learn how to use them, like SQL injection, OWASP, NMAP
• Find out how to ethically gain access to a company’s secure information in a pen test
• Complete a risk assessment, security assessment or security posture to find where security weaknesses are
• Find out how to do an IT health check and vulnerability scan
• Study organisations like PCI DSS and how their security assessment is done
• Discover common security issues associated with a number of commonly used programs, including open source programs
• Find out where security vulnerabilities often occur and how to use pen testing tools to shore up those vulnerabilities before they can be exploited
• Run case studies and dry tests with particular computer systems and network infrastructure that you’ll come across in your work
• Write and develop a penetration test report that can be used by companies to improve their computer systems and internal network
• Learn about the GDPR and how that will affect your work
• Find out about the difference between a black box, grey box and white box pen test
• Discover what social engineering pen testing is and how it’s different

By studying penetration testing, you open yourself to a lifelong, rewarding career. Application testing is done by almost every company that creates or runs programs or apps for application security, source code needs to be secure for cross-site scripting, and pen testers can even work for the government or NCSC, or even the ISO 27001 to ensure that secure databases stay that way and network penetration testing has to be regularly carried out to check that hackers aren’t getting crucial information via wifi or ethernet connections.

Plus, there is a difference between a penetration test, a red team test and a vulnerability assessment – understanding the difference and potentially being able to run them all puts you ahead of someone who learnt from home.

How to get started studying penetration testing

If you’re interested in becoming one of the security professionals who keeps our information and companies safe on computers, then studying a course is the best way to get started! Regardless of where you want to work, what your target system is and where you’re starting from, there’s a course for you, so get browsing and find out how today!