Penetration Testing - Exploitation

This course is a part of Cybersecurity Fundamentals, a 9-course MicroBachelors series from edX.

This is the 8th course in the intermediate, undergraduate-level offering that makes up the larger Cybersecurity Fundamentals MicroBachelors Program. We recommend taking them in order, unless you have a background in these areas already and feel comfortable skipping ahead.

Information Security - Introduction to Information Security

Information Security - Authentication and Access Control

Information Security - Advanced Topics

Network Security - Introduction to Network Security

Network Security - Protocols

Network Security - Advanced Topics

Penetration Testing - Discovering Vulnerabilities

Penetration Testing - Exploitation

Penetration Testing - Post Exploitation

These topics build upon the learnings that are taught in the introductory-level Computer Science Fundamentals MicroBachelors program, offered by the same instructor.

This is a self-paced course that continues the development of ethical hacking skills. The curriculum provides an introduction to the exploitation phase of penetration testing topics. Among the topics covered are foundations of explorations, application debugging, reverse engineering, exploitation development, and web application exploitation. In this class, students learn the third phase of penetration testing; exploitation. In the exploitation phase, the penetration testers try to exploit security weaknesses actively. Exploits are developed to, for example, gather sensitive information or to enable the ethical hacker to compromise a system and manifest themselves on it. Once a device is successfully compromised, it is quite often possible to penetrate more systems because the malicious users now have access to more potential targets that were not available before. The additional marks are accessible because the compromised system can interact with internal devices that are not accessible from the Internet. For any new targets, the reconnaissance and enumeration phases are re-entered, to gather information about these new systems and exploit them.

Industry Certification Preparation

This program covers much of the material that is assessed on the CompTIA’s Security+ certification exam. Upon program completion, verified track learners will receive a 36% discount code for the CompTIA Security+ exam.

What you'll learn