What is penetration-testing?

A guide to ethical security testing that simulates attacks against applications, networks, and infrastructure. It records vulnerabilities, evidence, severity, and suggested fixes.

Use it for pre-release checks, security reviews after incidents, compliance assessments, third-party audits, and red-team exercises.

It helps find exploitable weaknesses before attackers do and provides a structured way to document them.

penetration-testing — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by aj-geddes

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts --skill penetration-testing

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/penetration-testing/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/penetration-testing)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/penetration-testing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/penetration-testing/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/penetration-testing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/penetration-testing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 500 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

Socket warn 16 Sept 2026
Snyk pass 16 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00036	$0.00500
Opus 5.5	$0.00014	$0.00200
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00007	$0.00100
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00050

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 23e90bcd172d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

penetration-testing scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/security-checklist.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/penetration-testing/SKILL.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Overview

Systematic security testing to identify, exploit, and document vulnerabilities in applications, networks, and infrastructure through simulated attacks.

When to Use

Pre-production security validation
Annual security assessments
Compliance requirements (PCI-DSS, ISO 27001)
Post-incident security review
Third-party security audits
Red team exercises

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# pentest_framework.py
import requests
import socket
import subprocess
import json
from typing import List, Dict
from dataclasses import dataclass, asdict
from datetime import datetime

@dataclass
class Finding:
    severity: str
    category: str
    target: str
    vulnerability: str
    evidence: str
    remediation: str
    cvss_score: float

class PenetrationTester:
    def __init__(self, target: str):
        self.target = target
        self.findings: List[Finding] = []

    def test_sql_injection(self, url: str) -> None:
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide	Contents
Automated Penetration Testing Framework	Automated Penetration Testing Framework
Burp Suite Automation Script	Burp Suite Automation Script

Best Practices

✅ DO

Get written authorization
Define clear scope
Use controlled environments
Document all findings
Follow responsible disclosure
Provide remediation guidance
Verify fixes after patching
Maintain chain of custody

❌ DON'T

Test production without approval
Cause service disruption
Exfiltrate sensitive data
Share findings publicly
Exceed authorized scope
Use destructive payloads

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 95 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 23e90bcd172d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

penetration-testing is a skill published in the GitHub repository aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts (376 stars, last pushed 8mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 500 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.