Policies – principles, rules, and standards

Your organization probably already has policies around security testing in place, although probably in a different manner than you would expect. At the beginning stage, any form of penetration testing is most likely explicitly disallowed! To enable offensive security engineering, it's necessary to augment these rules and standards to provide a framework for the offensive team to perform its duties.

Policies and standards are also there to protect the offensive security team to ensure the team is working within an established and authorized set of policies. As the manager of the program, you should also ensure that everyone that carries out such activities has read and agreed to follow these rules. Again, there might already be an established process in your organization. If not, find yourself a way to track it.

Principles to guide and rules to follow

Penetration testing and offensive security are some of the most exciting...