Ethical Hacking vs Penetration Testing: What’s the difference?

Key points of functional differences

• Penetration testing has the motive to find hidden vulnerabilities in the target environment. On the other hand, ethical hacking involves different tricks to hack and find all kinds of security flaws within the infrastructure.
• Penetration testing is focused on the security-specific assessment of the infrastructure. Ethical hacking is a comprehensive methodology to seal every hole in your IT security net, and penetration testing is also a part of it.
• To be a good penetration tester, one needs to have prior experience in ethical hacking. Whereas ethical hacking is the first step towards being a penetration tester. To put it in an uncomplicated way, if we consider ethical hacking as a degree course then penetration testing is a specialization.
• You need to possess expert-level knowledge to work as a penetration tester on specific domains and networks. While ethical hacking requires the awareness of the technicalities of the software and hardware of digital devices connected to the network.
• Ethical hacking involves detailed paperwork including a legal agreement. On the other hand, penetration testing does not necessarily require heavy documentation.
• Penetration testing is a far more compact procedure than ethical hacking. While ethical hacking is a thorough procedure that takes up a lot more time and effort as compared to penetration testing.
• You only need to have the knowledge and access to the specific aspect under test for penetration testing. For instance, you just need to have access to the web infrastructure of an organization to conduct Web Application Pentesting for it. On the other hand, you need to access a wide range of computer systems within the IT infrastructure of the organization to carry out ethical hacking.