Farah Abu-Dabaseh and Esraa Alshammari, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Jordan

The using of information technology resources is rapidly increasing in organizations, businesses, and even governments, that led to arise various attacks, and vulnerabilities in the field. All resources make it a must to do frequently a penetration test (PT) for the environment and see what can the attacker gain and what is the current environment's vulnerabilities. This paper reviews some of the automated penetration testing techniques and presents its enhancement over the traditional manual approaches. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first research that takes into consideration the concept of penetration testing and the standards in the area.This research tackles the comparison between the manual and automated penetration testing, the main tools used in penetration testing. Additionally, compares between some methodologies used to build an automated penetration testing platform.

Penetration test, Automation, Exploitation, Ethical hacker, Penetration testing standards.