Offensive security testing is attacking your own company on purpose, with permission, to find its weak points before a real attacker does. It is also called ethical hacking or security testing. The attack is real, but it follows written rules: which systems may be attacked, when, and what the testers must never do, such as deleting data.
A scanner lists flaws. It does not show whether an attacker can actually use those flaws to reach valuable data. Offensive testing answers that question directly, by trying.
The work is done in four main ways, and each has its own page. In penetration testing, named testers attack one app or network for a fixed period, usually a few weeks, and write a report. On a bug bounty platform, many outside hackers test the company all year, and the company pays them for each flaw they find. Breach and attack simulation (BAS) replays known attacker techniques safely, every week, to check that the defences still react. Automated red teaming uses an AI agent that plans and runs the attack itself. A red team is a group that attacks its own side to test the defence.
Most companies combine these methods. Say an online pharmacy in Jaipur takes orders through its website and its app. Before each major release, a testing firm runs a two-week penetration test on the app. A bug bounty programme stays open all year, for anything that the testers missed. Every week, a breach and attack simulation tool checks whether the SIEM still raises alerts for 40 common attacker techniques. The pharmacy's security team reads one combined list of everything that was found, and fixes the most serious flaws first.
In India, regulators often require such testing. The RBI and SEBI expect the companies they regulate to have their systems tested regularly. Many of these audits must be done by an auditor on the list of auditors approved by CERT-In, the government's cyber security agency.
The findings return to the rest of the security work. A flaw that the testers have proved can be used goes to the top of the vulnerability scanner's list. Findings in the company's own software go to application security posture management (ASPM), which gives developers one short list of what to fix.
Offensive testing is changing fast. Attackers now use AI models to find weak points faster, so defenders use the same models to test themselves more often. This is described in AI in cybersecurity.