Your team has won a contract to infiltrate an organization. The company wants to have the attack be as realistic as possible; therefore, they did not provide any information besides the company name.

Reconnaissance (also called information gathering) is the foundational first step of any penetration test, especially in a black-box engagement where no internal information is provided. The tester must collect publicly available data about the target - such as DNS records, WHOIS data, employee information, and network ranges - before any scanning or exploitation can be planned. Skipping this phase leads to inefficient and incomplete testing.

Escalation (privilege escalation) is a later-phase activity that occurs after initial access has already been obtained, not at the start of an engagement.

Scanning involves actively probing the target network for open ports and services, but it requires target IP ranges and hostnames that can only be identified after reconnaissance.

Enumeration involves extracting detailed information from identified services and systems and comes after scanning, making it the third phase, not the first.