In this chapter, we are going to cover the key concepts of the penetration testing process, with particular reference to wireless penetration testing.

Penetration testing is the process of simulating attacks against a system or a network to point out its misconfigurations, weaknesses, or security vulnerabilities and their relative exploits that could be used by real attackers to gain access to the system or network.

The process of identifying and evaluating vulnerabilities is called vulnerability assessment and it is sometimes used as a synonym for penetration testing, but they are actually distinct processes; indeed, penetration testing generally includes vulnerability assessment and also the successive attack phase to practically exploit the vulnerabilities that are found. In some cases, depending on the scope of the penetration test, a full vulnerability assessment is not required as the penetration test may only focus on specific vulnerabilities to attack.

A penetration test can be external or internal. An external penetration test (sometimes also referred as a black box penetration test) tries to simulate a real external attack, with no prior information about the target systems and networks being given to penetration testers, while an internal penetration test (also referred as white box) is performed by penetration testers who are given access as insiders and try to exploit the network vulnerabilities to increase their privileges and do things they are not authorized to do, for example, launching man-in-the-middle attacks, as we will see in Chapter 7, Wireless Client Attacks.

In this book, we are mainly going to focus on external penetration testing.