Penetration Testing Services
Identify vulnerabilities in your systems, networks, applications, and cloud infrastructure.
What is a penetration test?
Penetration testing (or pentesting) involves finding and exploiting vulnerabilities within your IT systems, websites, applications and cloud infrastructure. It’s sometimes referred to as ‘ethical hacking’. Penetration testers find methods attackers use to gain access to your assets.
Trusting the effectiveness of your organisation’s IT security controls is crucial to mitigating risks and preventing malicious access to your systems and data. Pentesting enables you to remediate vulnerabilities and improve your organisation’s security strategy.
Why does your organisation need a pentest?
With an ever-changing IT landscape and an evolving cyber threat, regular pentesting can help you to:
- Gain assurance in your IT security controls’ effectiveness
- Prevent malicious actors from accessing or making changes to your systems and data
- Maintain compliance with data regulations to protect personally identifiable information (PII) within your IT environment
- Prevent data breaches or loss
- Prove to customers or other stakeholders (i.e., during a business acquisition) that products, services or internal security practices are appropriate to protect their interests
- Securely implement technologies or solutions that would otherwise dramatically change your technical environment and/or increase your organisation’s attack surface
Our approach to penetration testing
Our consultants conduct rigorous penetration testing of your networks, systems and applications using industry-standard practices. We are CREST-approved and certified to the UK Penetration Testing discipline. This affirms our expertise and professionalism in delivering these specialised services. Each of our pentesting services adheres to the following assessment methodology:
Reconnaissance
Pentesting starts with building a map of the target environment, system or application (known as the ‘attack surface’) to establish the avenues of attack. We obtain detailed information about the attack surface using active and passive information gathering, port scanning and non-intrusive service enumeration techniques.
Fingerprinting
We perform further scanning of your applications, services and systems to discover helpful information about the configuration of your assets. This process will often reveal technologies and versions of software in use, exposed sensitive files, misconfigured services and other facts about your assets that require further investigation.
Analysis
With a vast amount of information gathered about the target(s) under assessment, we combine various manual and automated techniques to find attack vectors.
Our team’s expertise allows us to discover hard-to-find vulnerabilities and plan an effective strategy to demonstrate exploitation.
Exploitation
We use our advanced technical capability and a mix of tools, scripts and offensive techniques to simulate the exploitation of vulnerabilities. We’ll communicate with you before we start to ensure you’re happy for us to continue.
Lateral movement
Once we’ve achieved a foothold via successful exploitation, our team replicates the attack lifecycle to find and compromise other targets of value within the context of exploited systems.
Clean up
Once we’ve obtained evidence of the successful attack chain, we remove any artefacts or changes applied to the system, restoring it as closely as possible to its original state.
Penetration test reporting
Acting upon the vulnerabilities found during an engagement is essential to maximise the value of a penetration test. Our service provides a detailed technical report to aid you in making these critical improvements, including:
- A succinct management summary with key statistical information
- A technical overview covering the most important considerations
- Full technical details of every vulnerability discovered, including the assessed impact
- Precise vulnerability weightings to aid in prioritising remediation
- Detailed and practical guidance for technical remediation of each vulnerability
We understand that technical reports can be challenging to consume, so we tailor ours based on feedback from our valued customers. Our consultants are always available to discuss your questions once you’ve received the report.
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Types of penetration testing
Penetration testing is a broad term covering several types of offensive cyber security assessment. Our team provides the following penetration testing services:
Our network and infrastructure penetration testing assesses your networks and systems for vulnerabilities. It simulates exploitation safely to show the potential impact. We have extensive knowledge of enterprise environments and a vast range of networking and security technologies.
Mobile application pentesting provides an in-depth review of your applications’ security to ensure data is protected. Our team has deep experience in assessing iOS, Android and Windows platforms, and many mobile development frameworks such as React Native, Flutter and Xamarin.
Assesses your web applications and APIs for security vulnerabilities that may be exploited to compromise your applications. We use comprehensive OWASP testing methodologies and leading tools to provide assurance that your applications are secure.
Cloud penetration testing attempts to find misconfigurations that may expose your cloud systems and data to attack. It’s performed against environments hosted by a cloud service provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.
Why choose Sentrium?
Our experienced and CREST-certified penetration testing team has the required level of expertise to provide an accurate and comprehensive penetration testing service.
Our consultants will work closely with you to determine the most appropriate testing and clarify any questions you may have.
Our communication-focused client-first approach ensures that our consultants are always on hand to answer any questions you may have. We pride ourselves on establishing and building strong and collaborative long-term relationships with our clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a pentest?
Penetration testing is the process of assessing an IT system’s security using similar techniques and tools that a malicious actor would use. It can help you understand the vulnerabilities affecting IT systems and how your organisation may be affected.
How often should a penetration test be performed?
Pentesting should typically be done annually, especially where there are certification or regulatory requirements to conduct penetration testing. However, there are some cases where pentesting should be performed more often. For example, where substantial changes are made to networks, custom software or applications have frequent development releases, or new products or services are launched.
How long does a pentest take?
This depends on the agreed scope of the penetration testing. For example, the size of the network under review, the type of network, and whether any pentesting is performed authenticated may affect the length of the assessment.
Will a pentest disrupt our services?
Our skilled pentesters follow strict guidelines and legal and technical standards to ensure minimal disruption to your business. Our consultants work with you to establish high-risk systems and operational concerns during the scoping process.
Is Sentrium a CREST-approved provider?
Yes! Sentrium has achieved the standards set by CREST and is a CREST-approved penetration testing service provider. We’re proud to offer services that achieve CREST’s extremely high standards of quality and professionalism, which are recognised internationally.
What happens after a penetration test?
Once your penetration test is complete, we compile a detailed report containing the identified vulnerabilities, what risks they pose and recommendations on how to remediate them. Once we’ve delivered the report, our team will be available to discuss the results in detail and answer any questions.
What steps are involved in a penetration test?
Once we’ve established the scope of the assessment, our CREST-accredited team provides penetration testing services using an industry-standard methodology. First, a pentester uses reconnaissance techniques to gather information about the target environment. They will then fingerprint applications, services and systems, gathering further information for exploitation and lateral movement. This process is repeated to gain the highest-level access to the targets to demonstrate the impact of an attempted compromise.
Who conducts a pentest?
Our skilled CREST-approved penetration testers perform pentesting to simulate attacks using the same techniques used by hackers and cyber criminals.
How much does a pentest cost?
This depends on the scope and how many days it will take to complete the project. Contact us for a no-obligation quote where we can learn your requirements and provide a detailed proposal for penetration testing services.
What is CREST?
CREST is an international not-for-profit accreditation and certification body representing and supporting the technical information security market. Companies can become a CREST member and apply for CREST-accredited services. The application requires a rigorous assessment of companies’ processes, data security and service methodologies to ensure they adhere to a best practice standard.
Why should I use a CREST-approved pentesting company?
Working with a CREST-approved penetration testing provider ensures you’re in safe and experienced hands. You should have the confidence that your penetration test is thorough and comprehensive. Your provider must conduct a technically comprehensive test adhering to CREST’s information security and quality assurance requirements.
Our Clients
Common vulnerabilities
Despite growing awareness and understanding of cyber security in all aspects of business, common vulnerabilities and weaknesses still affect many applications, networks and services. Sentrium’s CREST-approved penetration testing services help identify and remediate these vulnerabilities, enabling organisations to protect assets that malicious actors may target. Our penetration tests often find vulnerabilities such as:
Insecure configurations
Systems, applications, software packages and cloud environments can be highly configurable. Misconfigured features can have a disastrous effect on a service’s overall security posture.
Outdated and vulnerable software
Patching may be a basic security principle, but the reality can be incredibly complex. Discovering outdated and unsupported software during a penetration test is not unusual. Unsupported software no longer receives security patches and is commonly targeted by opportunistic attackers.
Business logic flaws
Incorrect assumptions about how users will interact with a system can result in logic flaw vulnerabilities. In web applications, this is often seen in excessive reliance on client-side controls, which allow the malicious manipulation of workflows.
Insecure programming practices
Common weaknesses include injection vulnerabilities, such as command injection, database (SQL) injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). These vulnerabilities often seriously affect an application’s security and the sensitive data it processes.
Cryptographic failures
Cryptographic failures include the improper use of unsecured protocols, ciphers, certificates and legacy encryption technologies. These weaknesses may allow a hacker to intercept sensitive information as it moves across a network.
