Penetration Testing Fundamentals: Recon, Scanning, and Exploitation

<p>Follow Diego Ferreira, a penetration tester at the boutique security firm Voss Security Partners, as he leads his first end-to-end engagement for Lumen Ridge Credit Union ahead of a regulatory exam. Diego works through the full penetration testing lifecycle: negotiating a signed Rules of Engagement and legal authorization before touching a single system, running passive and active reconnaissance with OSINT tools, certificate transparency logs, and subdomain enumeration, mapping the attack surface with Nmap service and version detection, exploiting a real known CVE (the vsftpd 2.3.4 backdoor) with Metasploit against a vulnerable target to prove root-level impact, and writing a professional report structured for a board, an IT team, and a regulator all at once.</p>

Tools: nmap, metasploit, osint, penetration testing