pentest-playbook

pentest-playbook is a skill for Claude Code from uphiago/recon-skills. It costs 16 tokens per session (2,336 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A seven-phase plan for a penetration test, which is an authorized security assessment of a system. It covers information gathering, active checking, web inspection, framework testing, and exploitation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan engagements, decide what to do after reconnaissance, and learn the lifecycle of a professional penetration test.
Why use it?
It gives a consistent order of work when starting with an unknown target or moving on after reconnaissance. It also identifies related skills for each phase.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to plan engagements, decide what to do after reconnaissance, and learn the lifecycle of a professional penetration test.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/uphiago/recon-skills/pentest-playbook
About the project

Recon Skills is a pack of security-testing skills covering reconnaissance, web applications, APIs, authentication, vulnerability validation, cloud infrastructure, and reporting. Security professionals use it for authorized assessments of systems they own or have written permission to test. The catalogue entries are individual skills from the pack.

uphiago/recon-skills · 1,254 stars · on GitHub · hiago.sh

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 uphiago/recon-skills --skill pentest-playbook
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/uphiago/recon-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

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.

agentmods badge for pentest-playbook

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uphiago/recon-skills/pentest-playbook/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/uphiago/recon-skills/pentest-playbook)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/uphiago/recon-skills/pentest-playbook"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uphiago/recon-skills/pentest-playbook/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for pentest-playbook

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/uphiago/recon-skills/pentest-playbook"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uphiago/recon-skills/pentest-playbook.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 16 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,336 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Privilege Escalation · line 75
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 156
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high YARA Match · line 116
    YARA rule matched a hack tool or exploit indicator (offensive tools, reconnaissance, privilege escalation, or exploit frameworks).
    Fix: Remove offensive tool references and exploit code. Legitimate agent skills should not contain penetration testing tools, exploit frameworks, or reconnaissance utilities.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00016 $0.02336
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.01168
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00467
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00234

Measured 12d ago against content hash 5077d176ee92, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pentest-playbook scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 12d ago.

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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

compatibility: Requires curl, nmap, python3
meta/pentest-playbook/SKILL.md · 165 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 165 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pentest Playbook Skill

7-phase master pentest pipeline covering the full lifecycle from passive reconnaissance to exploitation and reporting. Distilled from 100+ targets across government, healthtech, fintech, e-commerce, ISP, and SMB sectors. This is the "meta-playbook" — it tells you what to do at each stage of an engagement and which skills to load for each phase.

When to Use

  • Starting a new pentest engagement with an unknown target.
  • You need the canonical workflow for any type of target.
  • After surface recon — this playbook tells you what to do next.
  • Training — understand the full lifecycle of a professional pentest.

The 7-Phase Pipeline

Phase Name Focus Key Skills Duration
1 Passive Recon OSINT, subdomains, leaks, tech stack subdomain-enumeration, offensive-osint 30-60 min
2 Active Recon Port scans, live hosts, tech detection port-mass-scan, port-service-discovery, web2-recon 30-60 min
3 Web Enumeration Sensitive files, .env, CORS, JS secrets web-enumeration, cors-credential-wordpress, js-secrets-extraction 20-40 min
4 Framework Exploit WordPress, Laravel, Spring, .NET hunt-wordpress, hunt-laravel, hunt-springboot, hunt-aspnet 30-60 min
5 Cloud & Infrastructure Firebase, Supabase, S3, Cloud Functions hunt-firebase, hunt-supabase, cloud-iam-deep 30-60 min
6 Deep Exploitation SQLi, SSRF, RCE, ATO, chains hunt-sqli, hunt-ssrf, cross-attack-chains 1-4 hours
7 Report & Remediation Documentation, PoC, CVSS scoring report-writing, triage-validation, evidence-hygiene 1-3 hours

Per-Phase Procedure

Phase 1 — Passive Recon

# 1. Subdomain enumeration
subfinder -d $TARGET -silent | tee subs.txt
curl --max-time 30 --connect-timeout 10 -s "https://crt.sh/?q=%.$TARGET&output=json" | jq -r '.[].name_value' >> subs.txt

# 2. Tech stack detection via response headers
curl --max-time 30 --connect-timeout 10 -sI "https://$TARGET" | grep -iE "server|x-powered-by|x-aspnet|x-generator|x-runtime"

# 3. Google dorks
# site:$TARGET filetype:env DB_PASSWORD
# site:$TARGET "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----"

# 4. GitHub code search (SA keys, .env, credentials)
# See google-dorks-catalog skill for full list

Read the full file on GitHub · 165 lines

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.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 165 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A 5077d176ee92

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pentest-playbook is a skill published in the GitHub repository uphiago/recon-skills (1,254 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 16 tokens to every session and 2,336 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.