External Penetration Testing
An external penetration test evaluates your organization's internet-facing attack surface from the perspective of an outside attacker with no insider access or credentials. This is the most common starting point for businesses that have never had a security assessment.
What Gets Tested
Your public IP ranges, firewalls, VPN gateways, mail servers, DNS infrastructure, web servers, and any other services exposed to the internet. The goal is to identify misconfigurations, unpatched vulnerabilities, weak authentication, and attack chains that could give an outsider access to your internal network.
How It Works
Testing begins with reconnaissance and enumeration of your external footprint, identifying open ports, running services, and software versions. From there, discovered vulnerabilities are manually validated and exploited in a controlled manner to determine actual risk — not just theoretical scanner output. The entire engagement is conducted remotely and typically takes one to two weeks depending on scope.
What You Receive
A detailed report documenting every finding with severity ratings, evidence of exploitation, and specific remediation steps your IT team can follow. You also receive an executive summary suitable for leadership or board-level reporting. A findings debrief call is included to walk through results and answer questions.
Who Needs This
Any business with internet-facing infrastructure. If you have a public website, email server, VPN, or cloud-hosted services, an external penetration test tells you what an attacker sees and whether they can get in.
Ready to assess your external attack surface?
Let's discuss your infrastructure and how an external penetration test can help protect your business.
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