Penetration testing methodologies

As we all know, there are no official penetration testing standards defined; however, our security community has introduced a few standards for all security personnel to follow. Some of the commonly known standards are the Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual (OSSTMM), theĀ Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES), and theĀ Information Systems Security Assessment Framework (ISSAF). Most of them follow the same methodology, but their phases have been named differently. We will take a look at each of them in the following sections and cover PTES in detail.