Understand Your Risk With An External Penetration Test
An external penetration test is the best way to determine if an attacker on the Internet can gain access to applications or the internal network. At Triaxiom we emulate the real-world attacks your organization is likely to face to quantify the risks of your network perimeter.
How an External Penetration Test Helps
An external penetration test emulates an attacker trying to break into your network from the outside. The goal of the engineer performing this assessment is to breach the perimeter and prove they have internal network access. This test includes:
- Open source reconnaissance against the organization
- Full port scan covering all TCP ports and the top 1,000 UDP ports of the targets in scope
- Full vulnerability scan of the targets
- Manual and automated exploit attempts
- Password attacks
Our External Penetration Test Process
Our first step is to jump on a quick call with you and one of our lead engineers to understand your organization’s needs and to scope the penetration test. Within a few hours following this call, you will have a proposal with pricing information and next steps.
Our Proposal will have everything you need to make a decision, including scope, our detailed methodology for the in-scope assessments, pricing information, and the biography of a lead engineer who will be directly involved with your assessment.
Should you choose to move forward with Triaxiom, we will provide the required contracts to get the project started. Once contracts are signed, we will assign a project manager to your account that will work with you to schedule the kick-off call and execution of the assessment.
On the kickoff call, we will review the Rules of Engagement document that will govern the project. It will include all project contracts, the rules the team will follow during testing, the testing schedule, and allow you to provide the necessary technical details to facilitate your assessment.
Once we are on the same page, we will get started. While execution times vary depending on the scope, on average, most projects take one to two weeks of active testing to complete.
All of our assessments go through two rounds of Quality Assurance to ensure our reports and tests meet the highest standards. This includes a technical QA process to ensure our methodology was followed and all evidence was properly collected/analyzed. This is followed by a thorough documentation QA to ensure our reports are consistent and actionable.
Once the reports are complete, we will share them with you via our secure portal. Finally, we will jump on a deliverable presentation to meet with your team to review all findings and answer any questions you may have.
At Triaxiom Security, our primary goal is to make your organization more secure. As part of that, any findings identified during our test that you wish to remediate can be included in a one-time retest within 90 days of report delivery, free of charge. The team will validate that your remediation efforts were effective and will update the reports to reflect your heightened security posture.
External Pen Test Deliverables
Each external penetration test concludes with a comprehensive report that clearly outlines your organization’s security posture and testing results. Key features of the report include:
- Executive summary highlighting strengths, risks, and takeaways
- Detailed results from the external penetration test
- Clear descriptions of risks, affected systems, evidence, and prioritized remediation recommendations
- Visual summaries and a risk rating scale
- Roadmap to gradually improve security posture
External Pen Test FAQs
On average, organizations with a small internet footprint—say, ten or fewer external hosts—can expect pricing to start around $5,000. Larger environments with fifty or more internet-facing assets may see costs in the $15,000–$20,000 range or higher. Ultimately, penetration testing pricing comes down to one thing: the time required for a skilled engineer to do the job right.
Much like cost, the time required to perform an external penetration test can vary by the size of the network. With that said, most external penetration tests can be completed in one week.
At Triaxiom Security, we do everything we can to give you a holistic view of your risk by emulating the real-world attacks you are likely to face. However, we also understand the impact that outages can cause and do everything we can to avoid any disruptions. We do not exploit any denial-of-service vulnerabilities and do not perform any stress/load testing. Further, as all of the devices on an external penetration test are already exposed to the Internet, they are likely being scanned on a regular basis anyway and any availability issues would likely already be known.
With that said, there is always a minor chance of accounts getting locked out or a system outage. When that happens, we stop all testing, figure out what caused the issue, and work with you to adapt testing going forward to meet your needs.
Our engineers have industry leading certifications including:
- PCI Qualified Security Assessor (QSA)
- Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
- Certified Ethical Hacker (C|EH)
- Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP)
- Offensive Security Web Expert (OSWE)
- GIAC Security Essentials Certified (GSEC)
- GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH)
- GIAC Web Application Penetration Tester (GWAPT)
Test Your Perimeter
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