A substantial amount of vulnerability verification will be necessary, in most cases, to ensure that your findings are actually exploitable. Mitigation efforts can be expensive and as such, vulnerability verification is a critical task in terms of your reputation and integrity. In our experience, we have noticed several situations where people just run a tool, grab the results, and present them directly to their clients. This type of irresponsibility and lack of control over your assessment may result in serious consequences and cause the downfall of your career. In situations where there are false negatives, it might even place the client at risk by selling a false sense of security. Thus, the integrity of test data should not be tainted with errors and inconsistencies. Following are a couple of procedures that may help you in documenting and verifying the test results before transforming them into a final report:
Taking detailed notes: Take detailed...