Finally, the Question you are reading and answering:

A security consultant has been urgently hired by a bank to discover any unknown and exploitable weaknesses within their business. As it was a long holiday weekend, half the workforce as well as senior management were not available, and so the consultant has not been onboarded yet. The consultant decided to take proactive measures and begin her activities.

The consultant first gathered preliminary intelligence on the target through various automated scanning tools. She then gained access to one of the internal networks by tunneling traffic through a remote VPN $($virtual private network$)$ connection. After exploiting several other vulnerabilities within the organization's servers and databases, the consultant managed to freely traverse multiple areas of the environment gathering the maximum amount of data possible. Once enough information was collected, she removed all traces of her presence in the breached networks. On the following business day, she encrypted the results of her security test and sent the password$-$protected report to the bank's senior management team.

Which of the following was conducted by the security consultant?

A$.$ Vulnerability assessment

B$.$ Penetration testing

C$.$ Hacking

D$.$ Ethical Hacking