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cisco certification wiki.3. Penetration assessmentPenetration assessment or penetration testing (a step up from vulnerability scanning) exploits vulnerabilities during the testing process. In addition to attempting to exploit known vulnerabilities, penetration testing can also identify unknown vulnerabilities in a system. During the penetration assessment, a list of vulnerabilities that can be used to attack the system can also be obtained with the help of a vulnerability scanner.For the purpose of penetration testing, especially for the purpose of discovering unknown security vulnerabilities, such tests need to be performed by people who are highly skilled and adept at using various automated or manual tools. Sometimes, a penetration test can be referred to as ethicalhacking, and the person performing the penetration test as a whitehat.Penetration testers will attempt to exploit a single vulnerability, or string multiple vulnerabilities, security flaws, and misconfigurations together to completely control the system. Vulnerabilitychaining is the process of uncovering and exploiting vulnerabilities in a sequential manner, with the intention of uncovering a second vulnerability from the first one that can be exploited. There are several ways to classify penetration assessments, commonly based on the amount of information received by the penetration tester prior to the penetration test, as shown below.zgjjwhite box (white box): according to this penetration testing method, the penetration tester not only has access to internal informationI. dot information, but also receive documents related to the system, system version, patch level, etc. In some cases, the penetration tester will also obtain information related to application source code or "passes" to access certain systems. The white-box approach is often used to simulate threats created by insiderthreats.blackbox: This penetration testing method is the opposite of the white-box method, in which the penetration tester is used to test all of the information about the application.The gray box is a penetration testing method that is somewhere between the white box and the black box. In this method, the penetration tester can find some of the security flaws, but not all of them.Since penetration assessment is a very invasive operation that may lead to suspension of service or complete unavailability of the system, management and the risk assessment committee should take extra care to ensure that penetration testing does not have any impact on operations. In general, a compromise needs to be found between performing hands-on testing and the risk of disrupting the normal conduct of business.273 Chapter 5 Introduction to Security Operations and Maintenance Management