Stages of a penetration test

Now that you understand what penetration testing is, you may be wondering what the flow of a penetration test is. Penetration testing has a number of stages, and each stage forms an important part of the overall penetration test.

The following stages follow the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES), which I found to be a great starting point. The full standard can be found at http://www.pentest-standard.org/.