From Aldeid

Penetration-testing

Penetration testing (shortened pentesting) is the art of assessing the security of an environment and, eventually, discovering vulnerabilities (sometimes also exploiting vulnerabilities to confirm them). Penetration-testing is also called hacking (hackers, white hats), and differs from cracking (crackers, black hats) in the motivations. The hacker is a security professional who acts with ethics whereas crackers act without rules. Crackers' motivations are challenges (e.g. deface a web site), data theft, vandalism and destruction.