What Is External Penetration Testing?
- External penetration testing is a type of penetration test that focuses on the external, internet-facing infrastructure of your corporate network. It’s used to mimic a cyber attack from outside your organisation, uncovering exactly what a hacker can see and do on your network from anywhere in the world.
- When executing an external penetration test, the tester will look to ethically penetrate facets of your public-facing infrastructure, such as your Firewall, VPN endpoints, Web Servers and Mail Servers.
- By safeguarding your client’s data and protecting your business from external threats, we can save you thousands of pounds in potential damages and ensure the reputation of your company remains intact in the event of a real cyber attack.
How Are External Penetration Tests Delivered?
- Our testers will use the same techniques a hacker would use to discover whether or not your data is secure, identifying any flaws in your security and allowing you to eliminate potential threats before they can harm your business.
- Our external penetration testing service follows a standardised set of procedures and methodologies as described under the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES). We’ll carry out detailed research on your internet-facing infrastructure and attempt to penetrate your network just as a hacker would. The only difference from a real cyber security attack is that our testing is done in a controlled environment away from your network.
- Due to the varied nature of applications per organisation, our penetration testers will attempt to tailor the general testing methodology per target. We use both an automated and manual approach with tools which are proprietary and developed in house for performing security assessments. This allows for not only an extremely realistic test, but a thorough assessment of your cyber security practices.
- Throughout the engagement we provide an end-of-day vulnerability notification outlining security issues found.
- Towards the end of the penetration test, the tester initiates the clean-up process followed by the report. The Tester removes all persistent malicious payloads and attacks that were found during the security assessment. This is to avoid any active malicious attackers attempting to take advantage of problems that have been identified through the engagement.
- Once the external penetration test has been completed, we’ll provide a detailed report on our findings, with actionable steps for remediation to protect your external network against cyber security threats.
- The external penetration test report is prepared with an executive summary and graph outlining vulnerabilities discovered during the engagement aimed towards senior management, with further detailed information expanding on the issues found, how to replicate the issues discovered, an approach to remediating the current issues and to prevent these vulnerabilities occurring again in the future.
Why Should I Have A Penetration Test?
External penetration testing serves as an effective method of safeguarding your public-facing infrastructure against cyber threats. By running simulations of genuine hacking techniques on your external infrastructure, our certified team of experts are able to highlight weaknesses in your systems and infrastructure to give you the knowledge you need to prevent a real attack.
For many organisations, external attacks present a likely threat to their data, making external penetration testing a necessary aspect of their data protection practices.
