Pentesting is short for Penetration Testing.

It is an authorised attack onto a system (both computer and physical systems) to discover security risks and vulnerabilities.

Stages

• Recon
• Planning
• Exploitation
• Post-exploitation (establishing persistance to the system)

Tools

There are penetration testing tools and frameworks to help perform penetration attacks

• Metasploit - Pentest framework for like literally everything
• Burp - Website pentest framework
• Wireshark - Network packet analyser
• Nmap - IP and port scanner
• Kali / Parrot / etcetera… - Operating System with pentest tools pre-installed
• Gobuster - URI directory list crawler