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At Triaxiom Security, we specialize in penetration testing. Our engineers have industry-recognized certifications and a wealth of experience performing penetration tests for Fortune 500 companies, small start-ups, and everything in between.

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What is an External Penetration Test?

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 that they can gain access to the internal network.

Some of the questions this test will answer include:

  • Can an attacker gain access to my website?
  • Can one user see the information of another user?
  • Can a lower privileged role gain access to more permissions?
  • Can a customer tamper with the site’s parameters, perhaps to purchase an item for free?
external penetration test

An external penetration test evaluates the resiliency of your organization’s network perimeter. It’s widely considered to be one of the first types of assessments that most organizations go through, as most are concerned with tackling their Internet-facing weaknesses first. And that makes sense, as you wouldn’t want to let anyone undermine your perimeter security in such a way that could lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data you want to protect.

This type of test is also designed to emulate real world threats, using penetration testers that understand how hackers think and know how to exploit vulnerabilities that are being used in the wild. Going above and beyond a simple vulnerability scan, an external penetration test seeks to uncover additional vulnerabilities, understand the real risk associated with identified vulnerabilities, and reduce false positives.

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WHAT DOES AN EXTERNAL PENETRATION TEST CONSIST OF?

Full Port Scan

Full Port Scan

In order to footprint an organization’s external perimeter, a port scan is used to understand which services are exposed and accepting inbound connections. These scans will take a look at all 65,535 TCP ports and the top 1000 most popular UDP ports.
Password Attacks

Password Attacks

Another important portion of external penetration testing are the opportunities for password attacks. These styles of attacks aim to use open source intelligence gathered and noted vulnerabilities, combining them in a way that makes password attacks more likely to succeed while avoiding protections in place. These attacks can help you understand shortcomings in password policies, account lockouts, and multi-factor authentication schemes.
Vulnerability Scan

Vulnerability Scan

Where some assessments would center around a vulnerability scan, this is really just the beginning of an external penetration test. We use a vulnerability scan to speed up the identification process for known issues and exploitable weaknesses that could lead to a more significant compromise.
Manual and Automated Exploit Attempts

Manual and Automated Exploit Attempts

This is really the bread and butter of an external penetration test, and the most important part of the assessment. It’s hard to completely cover everything that can happen during this portion of the attack, but it includes looking for vulnerabilities that automated scans can’t find, exploiting issues scans did find, understanding the risks associated with identified vulnerabilities, and noting any mitigating controls.
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