A Penetration Test or simply pen test, is a simulated cyber attack on a computer system, network, or application to evaluate its security by identifying vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.

It is a proactive security assessment performed by ethical hackers or security professionals where they will search for vulnerabilities, attempt to exploit them and evaluate the risk they pose to the origination as part of an overall security posture evaluation.

The goal is to test the effectiveness of security defenses and understand their security gaps to provides actionable insights to enhance the originations’ defenses.