Penetration Testing
Identify vulnerabilities before attackers do. Our expert-led penetration testing simulates real-world attacks across your web, network, mobile, and cloud infrastructure.
Services
Testing Services
Web Application Testing
OWASP Top 10 assessment, business logic testing, API security, authentication bypass, and session management analysis for modern web applications.
Network Penetration Testing
External and internal network assessments including firewall bypass, lateral movement, privilege escalation, and Active Directory attacks.
Mobile Application Testing
iOS and Android app testing - reverse engineering, API intercept, local storage analysis, certificate pinning bypass, and runtime manipulation.
Wireless Security Testing
Wi-Fi infrastructure assessments including rogue AP detection, WPA2/WPA3 attacks, evil twin setups, and wireless segmentation validation.
Red Team Operations
Full-scope adversary simulation - social engineering, phishing campaigns, physical intrusion, and multi-vector attack chains to test your defenses.
Cloud Penetration Testing
AWS, Azure, and GCP security assessments - IAM misconfigurations, storage exposure, serverless function abuse, and cross-account pivoting.
What We Do
What Penetration Testing Actually Involves
Penetration testing is a simulated attack conducted by practitioners with explicit permission to attempt to compromise specific targets. The goal is to identify vulnerabilities that an adversary could exploit before an adversary does, demonstrate the real-world business impact of those vulnerabilities through controlled exploitation, and produce findings with remediation guidance specific enough that your engineering team can act on them without interpretation. The value is in what is found and how it is explained, not in the act of running a scan.
Manual testing is what separates useful penetration testing from automated scanning repackaged as a pentest. Automated tools find known vulnerability classes reliably. They do not find business logic flaws, authentication bypasses that require understanding how the application works, privilege escalation paths specific to your IAM configuration, or chained vulnerabilities that individually appear low-severity but combine to produce critical impact. Every engagement we conduct is manually led. Tools are used where they add efficiency, but the findings that matter are the ones a practitioner identifies by thinking like an attacker rather than running a script.
Scope definition is the first decision that determines the value of a pentest. A scope too narrow misses the attack paths that matter. A scope too broad produces findings volume that obscures what is actually critical. We scope engagements around your real attack surface: the systems exposed to the internet, the trust relationships between internal systems, the identity architecture that governs access, and the data classification that determines what an attacker would target. The engagement brief documents exactly what is in scope, what is out, and what techniques are and are not authorized before testing begins.
Methodology
Our Approach
Scoping & Rules of Engagement
Define targets, boundaries, testing windows, and communication protocols.
Reconnaissance & OSINT
Passive and active intelligence gathering to map attack surface.
Vulnerability Discovery
Manual and automated testing to identify exploitable vulnerabilities.
Exploitation & Post-Exploitation
Controlled exploitation to demonstrate real-world business impact.
Reporting & Remediation
Detailed findings with severity ratings, evidence, and actionable fix guidance.
Retest & Validation
Verify remediation effectiveness with targeted retesting.
Deliverables
What You'll Receive
Compliance and Cloud
Penetration Testing for Compliance and Cloud Environments
Compliance-Driven Testing
PCI DSS Requirement 11.4 mandates penetration testing of the cardholder data environment at least annually and after significant infrastructure changes. HIPAA does not require penetration testing explicitly but OCR guidance and industry practice treat it as a reasonable and appropriate technical safeguard for organizations handling PHI. SOC 2 auditors expect evidence of penetration testing as part of the CC4 monitoring controls. FedRAMP CA-8 requires penetration testing for cloud service providers at impact levels that require authorization. We scope penetration tests to satisfy the specific framework requirement driving the engagement and produce reports structured to satisfy the evidence requirements of each.
Cloud Penetration Testing
Cloud penetration testing requires a different methodology than traditional network testing. The attack surface is defined by IAM configuration, resource exposure, serverless function permissions, and inter-service trust relationships rather than network topology. We assess IAM policies for privilege escalation paths using the same techniques adversaries use, identify storage resources exposed beyond their intended audience, test serverless function input handling for injection and authorization flaws, and evaluate cross-account trust relationships for lateral movement opportunities. Cloud providers each have terms of service governing penetration testing activity: we operate within those boundaries and notify providers where required before testing begins.
Red Team vs. Penetration Testing
A penetration test assesses specific systems or applications for vulnerabilities within a defined scope and timeframe. A red team operation simulates a targeted adversary attempting to achieve a specific objective, such as accessing sensitive data or compromising a critical system, without the defenders knowing an engagement is underway. Red team engagements test detection and response capability alongside technical controls: the value is understanding whether your monitoring and incident response program would catch a real attacker, not just whether vulnerabilities exist. Most organizations benefit from penetration testing before red team operations, because a red team that walks through unpatched vulnerabilities tells you less than one operating against a hardened environment.
FAQ
Common Questions About Penetration Testing
What is the difference between a penetration test and a vulnerability scan?
A vulnerability scan is an automated process that identifies known vulnerabilities by comparing system configurations and software versions against a database of known issues. It produces a list of findings with severity ratings but no verification of exploitability. A penetration test is a manual, practitioner-led engagement in which identified vulnerabilities are actually exploited under controlled conditions to demonstrate real-world impact. A penetration test also finds vulnerability classes that automated scanners cannot detect: business logic flaws, chained vulnerabilities, authentication bypasses specific to your application's implementation, and IAM misconfigurations that require understanding your specific policy structure to identify. Vulnerability scans and penetration tests serve different purposes and are most effective when used together rather than as substitutes for each other.
How often should we conduct penetration testing?
Frequency depends on your compliance requirements, the rate of change in your environment, and your risk tolerance. PCI DSS requires annual testing and testing after significant infrastructure changes. FedRAMP requires testing at defined intervals based on impact level. Outside of compliance-mandated timelines, annual testing is the baseline for most organizations, with additional testing triggered by significant architectural changes, new product launches, major dependency upgrades, and cloud environment expansions. Organizations with active development cycles and frequent deployments benefit from more frequent application testing. Annual network and cloud infrastructure testing combined with DevSecOps integration in the pipeline covers most of what point-in-time testing would otherwise find repeatedly.
What does a penetration test report include?
A useful penetration test report contains an executive summary that communicates business risk without requiring technical expertise, a technical findings section with CVSS scoring, reproduction steps, proof-of-concept evidence, and remediation guidance specific to your environment, an attack narrative describing how individual findings chain together to produce the highest-impact scenarios, MITRE ATT&CK mapping for each finding so your detection program can assess whether your monitoring would have identified the technique, and a remediation roadmap prioritized by risk rather than CVSS score alone. The report should be actionable: your engineering team should be able to reproduce each finding from the reproduction steps and implement each remediation from the guidance provided without needing to contact the testing team for clarification.
How should we prepare for a penetration test?
The most useful preparation is ensuring your environment reflects its normal operational state rather than a temporarily hardened version. Testing against a hardened environment that reverts after the engagement produces findings that do not accurately represent your real risk posture. Beyond that, we need network diagrams or architecture documentation for the systems in scope, credentials for authenticated testing where the engagement covers authenticated attack surfaces, and a named point of contact available during testing hours to coordinate on unexpected findings or scope questions. We handle the rest: reconnaissance, tooling, methodology, and documentation. The pre-engagement scoping call covers what we need from you specifically before testing begins.
What is the difference between a black box, grey box, and white box penetration test?
Black box testing simulates an external attacker with no prior knowledge of the target environment. The tester starts with only publicly available information and works to identify vulnerabilities through reconnaissance and discovery. Grey box testing provides the tester with partial information, typically credentials and some architectural context, simulating an insider threat or an attacker who has already achieved initial access. White box testing provides full access to source code, architecture documentation, and system credentials, enabling the most thorough assessment of the attack surface. Grey box is the most common configuration for web application and cloud assessments because it produces findings that reflect real attacker capability while ensuring testing time is spent on meaningful attack paths rather than reconnaissance that the tester could complete in advance with a briefing.
Book a Call
Ready to Test Your Defenses?
Book a free consultation to scope your penetration test and get expert recommendations.
Schedule a consultation
Choose a convenient time for a free 30-minute consultation.