External Network Penetration Testing
Your perimeter looks secure.
Let’s prove it.
External Network Security
Securing your external network involves protecting the systems and services that are exposed and accessible from the internet. This includes firewalls, network gateways, remote access services, and any infrastructure that forms your organisation’s external attack surface.
Because these systems are publicly reachable, they are continuously probed by attackers looking for misconfigurations, exposed services, and known vulnerabilities. A single weakness on the perimeter can provide an entry point into internal systems or sensitive data.
External network penetration testing simulates real-world attacks against your internet-facing infrastructure to identify what an attacker could discover and actually exploit. The goal is not just to find vulnerabilities, but to understand exposure, validate risk, and prioritise remediation based on real impact.
Who Needs External Penetration Testing?
External network testing is essential for:
Regular testing helps meet compliance requirements and validates that your external security controls are working as intended.
What’s Included in an External Pentest?
Our perimeter network penetration testing service focuses on your external assets, including (but not limited to):
Common External Network Vulnerabilities
Our testing frequently identifies:
How We Approach External Pentesting
Asset Discovery and Enumeration
We enumerate and discover your public facing assets, including servers, firewalls, and cloud services. To achieve this we use a combination of automated tools and manual techniques to ensure the breadth and depth of coverage you deserve.
Vulnerability Detection and Analysis
We perform manual vulnerability enumeration, supplemented with automated vulnerability scans to identify weaknesses in your infrastructure components. This includes identifying outdated software, misconfiguration, and other common security issues that could be exploited by attackers.
Exploitation and Lateral Movement
We safely attempt to exploit discovered vulnerabilities in a controlled manner to validate their existence and assess real-world impact. All exploitation is performed with appropriate safeguards and can be limited based on your risk tolerance
Manual Testing
We perform manual probing and analysis of exposed services, including web services, DNS, mail, and any other services that are detected during testing. With each service we identify the version of the software and perform further analysis to identify vulnerabilities and potential exploits.
Unauthorised Access
Where services are exposed that provide authentication functionality we can perform brute force or credential-stuffing attacks to identify potential weak, default, or reused authentication credentials. Through this we can determine if there are any weaknesses with brute force mitigation controls.
Security visibility included as standard
Every engagement includes complimentary access to Attack Surface Center – giving you a live view of findings as they’re discovered, not just a static PDF at the end. Track, manage, and remediate vulnerabilities in one place, throughout and beyond your assessment.
Pricing
for external network penetration testing
No obligation · Strictly confidential · Quote within one business day
Pricing Examples
Indicative ranges only. Your exact price is confirmed after a short scoping conversation – see full service pricing.
What’s Included
- Fixed-price proposal within one business day
- Manual, consultant-led testing. Not automated scans
- Report within 2 business days of testing completion
- Free focused retesting included to verify remediation
- No obligation to proceed, and all enquiries are confidential
External Network Pentest – common questions
The time taken for typical external penetration tests depends on scope, with the average test taking between 3-5 days.
Reports are delivered within 2 business days of testing completion.
External testing is non-disruptive and designed to safely simulate real attacks without causing service outages. We coordinate timing and agree acceptable testing windows.
However, there is an element of risk for any form of penetration testing, network, or vulnerability scanning, so we will enquire as to any legacy, sensitive or business critical services during scoping to ensure that extra care is taken to minimise any potential impact.
Modern day security testing shouldn’t be treated as a once per-year activity. External network testing should be performed annually at an absolute minimum.
However, we would recommend testing after any significant infrastructure changes, new service deployments, or following any security incidents.
Yes, external network pentesting is a requirement for PCI DSS under section 11.4. Like internal network pentesting, coverage of the internet-facing infrastructure should be included as part of the wider assessment.
The goal of an external pentest for PCI DSS is to determine whether an unauthenticated attacker could gain access to in-scope systems or cardholder data from outside your network.
External testing focuses on internet-facing systems accessible to any attacker, while internal testing assumes an attacker has already gained access to your internal network.
Yes, our external testing includes cloud-hosted infrastructure on AWS, Azure, GCP and other platforms that form part of your external attack surface.
Yes, external testing can typically be performed during business hours as it simulates attacks that occur constantly against internet-facing systems.
If you require out-of-hours testing, we can arrange this as part of the engagement planning process.
Ready to Test Your External Security?
No obligation. No sales pressure. Just transparent pricing and expert guidance.