A company hires outside security experts to evaluate the security status of the corporate network. All of the company's IT resources are outdated and prone to crashing. The company requests that all…

Penetration testing involves actively exploiting discovered vulnerabilities, which can crash or damage systems that are already unstable.

WAF testing specifically targets web application firewall rules and is not a general network assessment method for fragile legacy infrastructure.

Vulnerability scanners enumerate and probe systems to detect known weaknesses using techniques like banner grabbing and version checking, but they do not actively exploit the vulnerabilities they find. This non-destructive approach ensures that already unstable or outdated systems are not pushed into failure during the assessment.

White box testing gives testers full knowledge of the environment and typically involves active exploitation or code review, which still carries risk of system disruption.