Pen Testing Planning, Scoping, and Recon (2026)

Poorly scoped penetration tests waste budget, create legal exposure, and can take production systems down before any real testing begins.
Poorly scoped penetration tests waste budget, create legal exposure, and can take production systems down before any real testing begins.
In this course, Pen Testing: Planning, Scoping, and Recon, you'll gain the ability to plan, scope, and open a penetration testing engagement professionally and build an accurate picture of the target through passive reconnaissance.
First, you'll explore how to define the engagement scope and metrics, produce the governing documents such as the NDA, SOW, and rules of engagement, and establish a communication and escalation plan with emergency contacts and stop conditions. Next, you'll discover how to account for legal, cloud, and third-party considerations, including the testing policies of AWS, Azure, and GCP, data-residency constraints, and how to set goals that align with what the client actually needs.
Finally, you'll learn how to perform passive OSINT and target discovery with current tooling and certificate transparency logs, and how to assess exposed credentials and leaked secrets from breach data and public code repositories. When you're finished with this course, you'll have the skills and knowledge of penetration test planning, scoping, and passive reconnaissance needed to launch an engagement that is authorized, bounded, and grounded in real intelligence about the target.
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