Planning and Scoping Penetration Tests

This chapter explores regulatory and compliance considerations, restrictions related to locations, legal agreements and contracts, and the importance of permission. The scope determines what penetration testers will do and how their time will be spent. There are quite a few ways to categorize and describe assessments, but it helps to have some broad categories to sort them into. The types of assessments are goals‐based or objectives‐based assessments, compliance‐based assessments, and red‐team assessments. Known environment tests allow effective testing of systems without requiring testers to spend time identifying targets and determining which of them may allow a way in. Even a small organization may have a complex set of systems, applications, and infrastructure, and determining the scope of a penetration test can be challenging unless the organization has detailed and accurate architecture, dataflow, and system documentation.