This phase involves the process of determining the target of the penetration testing and choose the technique to gather the information which could be invasive, scanning or non-invasive. The activities are carried out in following steps:

• Planning and Preparation
• Methodology Designing
• Network Information Gathering

The information gathered in the pre-attack phase forms the basis of the attack strategy. The attack phase involves the actual compromise of the target. The attacker may exploit a vulnerability discovered during the pre-attack phase or use security loopholes such as a weak security policy to gain access to the system. Once inside, the attacker may escalate privileges and install a backdoor to sustain access to the system and exploit it. Our pen-testers advance through this phase by performing the following actions:

• Penetrate perimeter
• Acquire target
• Escalate privileges
• Execute, implant, retract

In this phase, our tester documents all activities and record all observations and results, so that the test can be repeated and verified for the given security posture of the organization. Then the tester formulates a detailed report indicating the point of entries most susceptible to security breaches and severity of the threat it poses to your network. The report also contains suggestions of corrective actions required to protect your environment from any future malicious attack. As per our basic protocol, our testers will restore your system to pretest state unless otherwise specified; in that case the tester will correct the security posture of the systems also.