PCO 303 - PenTest+ Certification - Hybrid

5 Continuing Education Units (CEU). This course is not for Credit(s).

This course is designed to enable the student to learn how to use various tools to exploit network-based and host-based system vulnerabilities for given scenarios after conducting a vulnerability analysis. Students complete post-exploit tasks then analyze and report penetration test results for given scenarios. Students develop mitigation strategies for vulnerabilities that are discovered based on best practices. This course prepares students for the CompTIA PenTest+ Certification exam. Topics to be covered include planning and scoping penetration tests, information gathering and vulnerability identification, passive and active reconnaissance, scanning, attacks and exploits, post-exploitation, penetration test reports, and penetration test best practices.

Course Objectives

Upon completion of this course, the students should be able to:

1. describe the importance of planning and scoping penetration testing process;
2. discuss common hacking methodologies to conduct passive and active reconnaissance to
carry out a penetration test;
3. perform various scenario-based network and hosts attacks using penetration tools;
4. construct mitigation strategies for various types of attacks;
5. prepare incident response reports;
6. analyze penetration test reports based on best practices;
7. explain the importance of communication during the penetration testing process;
8. analyze how penetration testing and ethical hacking fit into a comprehensive enterprise
information security program; and
9. describe ethical behavior appropriate to security-related technologies.