INFRASTRUCTURE PENETRATION TESTING

An attacker does not stop at your firewall — they use it as a starting line. A single exposed service, a forgotten host in the DMZ, or one reused credential is rarely the end of the story; it is the first step in a path that leads inward, from the perimeter to the servers and databases that actually matter. A vulnerability scanner will hand you a list of open ports and known CVEs, but it will not tell you which of those weaknesses an attacker can actually chain together to reach your crown jewels. Our infrastructure penetration test does exactly that: we treat your network the way a real intruder would, proving the path from initial foothold to sensitive data rather than cataloguing findings in isolation.

External and internal testing

Infrastructure testing splits into two engagements, and a complete assessment usually runs both.

External infrastructure pentest attacks your network from the Internet, the way a remote attacker with no prior access would. We probe everything you expose at the perimeter — public services, the DMZ, remote-access endpoints, anything reachable from outside — looking for the weakness that gets us a foothold on the inside.

Internal infrastructure pentest starts from inside the intranet. It models a malicious insider, a contractor with network access, or an attacker who has already breached the perimeter — through a phished laptop, for example — and is now looking to expand. From that vantage point we test how far an intruder can move once the outer wall is behind them.

Run together, the two engagements tell one continuous story: breach the perimeter from the outside, establish a foothold, then expand into the internal network — reaching the server zone and database farm, attacking critical servers, and collecting the sensitive information an attacker would actually be after. The result is not a list of open ports; it is a demonstrated attack path, showing which weaknesses matter because they connect, and which are noise.

How we work

Every engagement follows the same structure, framed by a clear pre-engagement agreement and closed by a report your team can act on. Before any packet is sent, we agree the objective, the scope, any compliance requirements the test must satisfy, and a shared understanding of the risk involved in testing production systems.

The active phases then run in order:

1. Reconnaissance & information gathering — We map the target: live hosts, exposed services, versions, network topology, and the trust relationships between systems. Nothing is attacked before it is understood.
2. Exploitation & initial compromise — We turn the weaknesses we found into a foothold — a misconfigured service, an unpatched host, a weak or default credential — establishing our first real access to the environment.
3. Privilege escalation & lateral movement — From that foothold we escalate privilege and move sideways: pivoting host to host, harvesting credentials, and working through the internal network toward the systems that hold real value. This is where the attack path is proven, not assumed.
4. Achieving the agreed test objectives — We drive toward the goals set during scoping — reaching the server zone, compromising a domain, accessing the database farm, or extracting a defined set of sensitive data — and record exactly how we got there.

Once execution is complete, everything is written up in the reporting phase described below. You always know which phase the engagement is in and what arrives next.

Active Directory and the internal estate

Most internal networks run on Microsoft Active Directory, and that is where an internal engagement earns its value. Once we have a foothold — even an unprivileged domain account — we enumerate the directory: users, groups, permissions, trust relationships, and the misconfigurations that quietly accumulate as a domain ages. We then map the attack paths those relationships create, tracing the chain of small privileges that adds up to Domain Admin. A single over-permissioned service account, a stale delegation, or a cached credential on the wrong host is often all it takes to turn a standard login into full domain control — and we prove that path host by host rather than asserting it. Where the network is segmented, we test whether the segmentation actually holds, or whether a foothold in one zone quietly reaches another.

How we limit risk

Testing production infrastructure carries real risk, and we manage it in the open rather than hoping nothing breaks. High-impact actions are agreed with you before we take them, not sprung on you afterward. If we find a critical vulnerability that should not wait for the final report, we tell you immediately so you can act. Any change we make to a production environment is controlled and recorded. Our tooling is a mix of open-source and licensed software — tested in our own lab and widely used in the security community — supplemented by custom scripts when a target needs a tailored approach; we do not run unreliable or untrusted tools against your systems. The aim is a test that proves real impact without becoming an incident of its own.

Scope we agree up front

We fix the boundaries of the test with you before it starts, so there are no surprises and no open-ended billing. Four dimensions define the engagement:

• Location — External, testing from the Internet against your perimeter, or internal, testing from inside your intranet. Many clients scope both to cover the full attack path.
• Scenario — Black-box, where we begin knowing nothing but an IP range, simulating an external hacker; or gray-box, where you grant some access up front — typically a standard user account — to simulate a malicious employee or an attacker who already has a toehold. Gray-box reaches parts of the network black-box testing may never touch, and shows what a legitimate account can be turned into.
• Number of IP addresses — The count of in-scope hosts, agreed in advance, so the scope and the timeline are fixed and transparent.
• Revisit / retest — Whether a retest is included, so we can verify your fixes after remediation rather than leaving you to take them on trust.

What you get

Every report contains, at minimum:

• Executive summary — a business-level risk picture, suitable for management and auditors.
• Findings by Risk Level — each issue rated Critical, High, Medium, or Low, so remediation can be prioritised objectively.
• Reproduction / POC for every finding — the exact steps and proof that reproduce each issue; your engineers should never have to guess how we did it.
• Remediation guidance — practical fixes tied to your environment, not scanner boilerplate.
• Retest verification — when a revisit is in scope, findings are re-checked after your fixes and the report is updated to reflect closed items.

Consistent with our track record across the practice, we have delivered zero blank reports — every engagement so far has surfaced real, validated findings.

Team credentials

Testing is performed by our in-house team holding industry certifications including OSCP, OSCE, CREST CRT, CREST CPSA, and GIAC GREM — credentials earned through rigorous, hands-on examination, not multiple-choice exams. See the full list of certifications the team holds.

Standards

Our methodology follows NIST SP800-115 (Technical Guide to Information Security Testing and Assessment), which structures the engagement from planning through discovery, attack, and reporting. Findings are rated by Risk Level and documented so your team can reproduce and close them.

Infrastructure testing rarely stands alone. It pairs naturally with web application testing for the services that sit on top of the network, and both feed into a broader penetration test programme scoped to what your audits require. When the question is not just "where are the technical weaknesses" but "how would an adversary combine people, process, and technology to reach our critical assets," that is the domain of red teaming.