What are the Penetration Testing Methodologies? Explain it.

An open-source security testing methodology manual (OSSTMM) basically includes almost all the steps involved in a penetration test. The methodology employed for penetration test is concise yet it’s a cumbersome process which makes it difficult to implement it in our everyday life. Penetration tests, despite being tedious, demands a great deal of money out of company’s budgets for their completion which often are not met by a large number of organizations NIST, on the other hand, is more comprehensive than OSSTMM, and it’s something that you would be able to apply on a daily basis and in short engagements. The screenshot indicates the four steps of the methodology, namely, planning, discovery, attack, and reporting. The testing starts with the planning phase, where how the engagement is going to be performed is decided upon. This is followed by the discovery phase, which is divided into two parts—the first part includes information gathering, network scanning, service identification, and OS detection, and the second part involves vulnerability assessment. After the discovery phase comes the attack phase, which is the heart of every penetration test. If you are able to compromise a target and a new host is discovered, in case the system is dual-homed or is connected with multiple interfaces, you would go back to step 2, that is, discovery, and repeat it until no targets are left. The indicating arrows in the block phase and the attack phase to the reporting phase indicate that you plan something and you report it—you attack a target and report the results. The organization also has a more detailed version of the chart discussed earlier, which actually explains more about the attack phase. It consists of things such as “gaining access,” “escalating privileges,” “system browsing,” and “install additional tools.” We will go through each of these steps in detail in the following chapters.
As you might have noticed, both the methodologies focused more on performing a network penetration test rather than something specifically built for testing web applications. The OWASP testing methodology is what we follow for all “application penetration tests” we do here at the RHA InfoSEC. The OWASP testing guide basically contains almost everything that you would test a web application for. The methodology is comprehensive and is designed by some of the best web application security researchers