A security team is switching firewall vendors. The director of security wants to scope a penetration test to satisfy requirements to perform the test after major architectural changes. Which of the…

Focusing only on publicly released DoS vulnerabilities for the new vendor is too narrow and does not assess whether the overall network architecture is secure after the change.

A configuration review followed by a targeted attack is limited in scope and does not simulate realistic threat scenarios across the broader network that the new architecture affects.

A discovery scan identifies what changed in the network topology but provides no assessment of whether those changes are exploitable or whether security objectives can be bypassed.

An objective-based approach instructs the red team to achieve realistic adversarial goals (e.g., reach a database server, exfiltrate data) rather than merely scanning for known CVEs. This validates whether the new firewall architecture and surrounding controls actually prevent an attacker from accomplishing meaningful objectives. It covers the full attack surface introduced by the architectural change, not just the firewall device in isolation.