Certified penetration tests are suitable for organisations of all sizes who wish to keep their networks and systems secure from cybersecurity threats.
An organisation’s technical environment presents threat actors with a variety of opportunities for breach and lateral movement. With reliance on technology growing in volume and complexity, even the most diligent security team can miss vulnerabilities in people, processes, and technology. This can lead to a cyber-attack which brings reputational, financial, and legal problems.
Penetration testing, also known as pen testing or ethical hacking, is a controlled test of the security of your network. A pen test provides insight into any security risks on your environment, including:
A pen test gives you the information you need to protect your business-critical information and your organisation’s reputation from an external or internal attack. Insights provided by the penetration test can be used to fine-tune your WAF security policies and patch detected vulnerabilities.
Testing should play a crucial role in your cybersecurity strategy. After a penetration test is completed and an organisation’s vulnerabilities are exposed, security controls can be enhanced to prevent future threats.
With 25 years of experience in Cybersecurity, our pen testing team has a significant understanding of how to approach different environments via ethical hacking, leading to better quality results for your organisation.
Each pen test comes with comprehensive management and technical reporting, which can apply to historical results to understand an organisation’s security maturity journey.
Sapphire’s penetration tests utilise agile and adaptive techniques to adjust to your organisation’s requirements. A wide range of pen testing, including internal and external network level testing, web and mobile application assessments, security audits, vulnerability assessments, testing for standards such as CE Plus and NCSC CHECK, Red Teaming, and more.
We want to ensure you have the confidence in Sapphire to keep your organisation secure. That is why our testers adhere to the strict standards of several accreditations in the UK.
Sapphire’s team of ethical hackers and penetration testing experts have the skills, experience and ability to identify cyber threats.
From CREST to Tigerscheme accreditations, we are committed to offering the best service.
Our external penetration tests are a comprehensive manual assessment of specified hosts. Every penetration test aims to identify, but not exploit, potential security vulnerabilities in the system (email, software, unrestricted data flows, or operating system). Manual penetration testing reduces false positives and provides comprehensive and legible reports.
Performing internal infrastructure and network-level penetration tests locally on specified hosts assesses the effectiveness of deployed internal security. This is specifically designed to identify weaknesses in the security of computer systems connected to the internal network, including workstations, servers, and network equipment.
As organisations conduct more business online, these systems become increasingly open to being exploited. Sapphire’s web application testing works to advise on security configurations and vulnerabilities by testing software and applications. Apart from the web application security testing, Sapphire also follows OWASP 2017 guidelines as well as focuses testing on the top 10 application threats.
Sapphire’s wireless testing checks for common configuration errors that could allow an attacker to compromise the network. Sapphire’s wireless testing will test both guest and corporate wireless networks to find errors that a malicious attacker could potentially exploit.
Firewalls are the front line of defence against most cyber threats, monitoring and filtering incoming and outgoing traffic and providing a barrier between a private internal network and the public internet. Sapphire reviews firewall configurations and rules to validate that they are implemented according to best practices as part of its penetration testing.
Build and configuration reviews are assessments that can be conducted on any host, network device, or server. Sapphire will audit your key IT assets’ security configuration based on industry-standard benchmarks, as well as Center for Internet Security (CIS) guidelines, and ensure that each component is compliant.
Sapphire is a member of the NCSC CHECK scheme, developed to enhance the availability and quality of IT health check services provided to the public sector and CNI in line with HMG policy. Organisations that deliver CHECK security testing services do so using consultants that have NCSC approved qualifications the relevant experience and have demonstrated that their pen-testing skills can be carried out using NCSC recognised methods. Sapphire is approved by the NCSC to provide CHECK penetration tests of IT systems to identify potential security vulnerabilities.
Any breadth and depth to any penetration test, Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is a method that uses publically available information on people or organisations to identify current and future risks. Utilising OSINT investigations alongside your pen testing programme can help organisations to identify security vulnerabilities and improve organisational awareness.
Social engineering has a similar function as a penetration test. However, social engineering tests the people within your organisation from trying to breach a building’s physical security to simulated phishing attacks rather than testing the exploits available on a network or IT infrastructure.
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Typically, carried out in 5 steps, including;
1. Planning. The pen testers receive the expectations and scope of the test from the organisation and start information gathering to understand potential attack vectors.
2. Threat modelling/ Scanning. Once a list of potential targets is identified, the pen test team will begin scanning the attack surface to determine the crucial first phase of the attack chain. Typically, this is through web-facing assets or social engineering.
3. Gain Access. In this step, the pen-tester uses the information gained in Steps 1 and 2 to access the target organisation via a simulated attack. This stage makes use of the web application attacks like SQL injection or cross-site scripting to detect the vulnerabilities.
4. Lateral movement. After gaining Access, the pen test team continues this simulated attack by moving laterally through the environment towards the target. This often involves privilege escalation and other ‘low and slow’ methods designed to remain stealthy.
5. Reporting. In the last step, the tester will provide a detailed technical report of their findings. The report will include a vulnerability assessment identified based on type and host, a solution or remediation to the issue, and the risk to the overall organisation from any external cyber-attacks.
With regular pen tests, an organisation can identify flaws in people, processes, and technology before an attacker does.
Security testing improves your organisation’s security posture by identifying the security weaknesses present and targeting the patches and other improvements that you need to make to policies and procedures.
As a leading cybersecurity firm in the United Kingdom, Sapphire can offer:
Our pen testing team has a significant understanding of how to approach different environments via ethical hacking, leading to better quality results for your organisation.
Our pen testers are all ethical hackers who use custom toolkits and well-established commercial pen testing tools to target your IT systems. This provides a unique and thorough security assessment which is not possible using automated scanners.
We value customer experience. That is why we will work in partnership with you to provide the highest quality customer experience while delivering our Cybersecurity services.
Sapphire’s pen tests utilise agile and adaptive techniques to adjust to your organisation’s requirements. Our pen testers can help your organisation expose security flaws and prevent attacks. Whether you are looking for support with an on-site project or require us to deliver our pen tests remotely.
The pen testing should be done at least once a year to ensure a more reliable and effective IT system, computer system, and network security management. The penetration test report will help reveal how the emerging vulnerabilities, the newly discovered threats, or other issues can be exploited by malicious hackers.
Since new cyber security vulnerabilities come up every week and are being exploited by criminals, it is important to identify security weaknesses and fix them accordingly. Penetration tests carried out by security professionals will provide an understanding of the security issues you might encounter.
A regular pen testing process conducted by a pen testing company will:
There are several methodologies and frameworks for doing pen tests, for example, the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES). Here are some of the techniques used in different companies:
While pen testing and vulnerability assessments are equally important as cyber security measures and may use the same tools, they are quite different. Vulnerability identification and assessment are made regularly (once a month), and a lengthy report is provided showing the detected vulnerabilities in the computer systems, IP addresses, web application systems, and across all devices.
On the other hand, the penetration tests are not done as regularly (every six months and they involve a detailed report of the security features, methods, the flaws found, and the security measures to be taken).