What Standards Govern a Professional Pentest?
A penetration test is a scoping-to-retest engagement that follows recognized frameworks such as PTES and NIST SP 800-115, combining automated discovery with manual verification performed by ethical hackers. Every finding is confirmed by hand before it reaches the report, and the engagement only closes once a retest confirms each vulnerability has actually been remediated.
Rather than a single technique, our pentesters draw on a stack of public standards to decide what to check and how deep to go: the OWASP Top 10 for the most frequent application risks, the CWE/SANS Top 25 for the coding errors that cause them, MITRE ATT&CK for real adversary technique, and OWASP ASVS together with the OWASP Testing Guide for the depth expected of each verification.
Six Phases, Not One Scan
A serious engagement never opens by firing off tools. It moves through six linked phases, each one feeding the next.
1. Scope & Rules of Engagement
What is in scope, what is out, the testing window, and who to notify if something breaks — agreed in writing before any testing starts.
2. Reconnaissance
We map the real target: domains, exposed services, technologies in use and data already leaked in public sources.
3. Identification & Verification
Every candidate finding is checked by hand, because ruling out the false positives that tooling leaves behind is the actual work.
4. Exploitation
Within the agreed rules, we actually exploit the flaw to demonstrate real impact instead of leaving it as a theoretical risk.
5. Post-Exploitation
From the access obtained, we measure how far the problem escalates: which data it reaches and which other systems it opens up.
6. Reporting & Retest
Every reproducible step gets documented, and once fixes ship we retest to confirm the entry point is actually closed.
What a Finished Pentest Report Contains
A report only earns its place if it lets someone fix the problem; a list of findings with no path to remediation does not. Each entry ships with the exact steps to reproduce it, the evidence collected during exploitation, and a CVSS-based severity rating, so the engineering team can confirm the issue and later confirm it is gone.
WhiteJaguars delivers an executive summary for leadership, a technical report with full evidence for the team that has to fix it, prioritized remediation guidance, and a debriefing session to walk through the results together.
Findings Stay Trackable After the Report Ships
Instead of a PDF that goes stale the day it lands, results are loaded onto a platform where the status of every fix stays visible to both sides until it is resolved. That keeps the retest phase honest: what closes the finding is verified evidence, not a status update.
How the methodology adapts to UK
The six phases stay fixed, but the reporting is tailored for UK technology, fintech and professional-services organizations. Working in line with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 (ICO), every finding is written up for reports ready to support UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 (ICO) compliance instead of a generic template.
Given advanced, well-resourced threat activity in UK, we weight scoping and post-exploitation toward the attack paths most likely to be attempted against your organization, not a generic checklist.
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