External Network Penetration Testing

We take customer communication as seriously as reporting or assessment execution. We engage with customers during all stages, and ensure that customer contacts are up to date in the language they understand. Post engagement, a free debrief is conducted to help the customers understand the weaknesses and prepare a mitigation plan.

The assessment-execution phase is followed by the analysis & reporting. Defendza performs analysis on the testing output, evaluates the risk impact and likelihood of exploitation in realistic scenarios before providing action plans to remediate the identified risks. All our reports address business as well as the technical audience with supporting raw data, including mitigation measures at strategic and tactical levels. 

The first level of access achieved from the "low-hanging" fruits found in previous phases does not allow full access to the underlying target. An attacker may not perform desired tasks for further activities such as password hashes retrieval, adding privileged users or tasks. Privilege escalation techniques are attempted by exploiting a bug, design flaw or configuration oversight in an operating system, or software/application to gain elevated access. This allows our security experts to perform elevated tasks that are key for lateral movement to infiltrate into the target network. 

Using an open-source, commercial, and custom scripts, vulnerabilities that would cause no network or host level impact are targeted for exploitation. The objective here is to find higher-level privileges to achieve the highest possible access on a system. This system is then used as a base for further lateral movement in order to attempt to compromise the entire network, domain, or the agreed target. Based on the scope of the project, this access can be maintained for days to achieve further objectives or considered a completion of the assessment.

The prioritised list of targets is scanned for vulnerabilities. This assessment involves checking both published as well as undocumented vulnerabilities against the target assets.  We sift through the scan results for false positives. The manual assessment ensures that only verified vulnerabilities are focused upon.

The first step of reconnaissance activity includes passively identifying the hosts and services visible on the Internet. This includes limited Open Source Intelligence phase. During red teaming or related offensive security projects, this exercise involves extensive information gathering about a customer's people, processes and technology in use. Research based threat intelligence is an integral part of any offensive exercise.

Overall, the aim of this phase aims to harvest as much information as possible about your organisation that would be used for later phases.