What is Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing, often called pentesting, is a controlled and ethical cyber attack carried out by security professionals. The goal is to find vulnerabilities in your IT environment and show you how a threat actor could potentially disrupt your systems
Our testers simulate attacker behaviour during a time-limited engagement, actively attempt to exploit what they find, and show you the genuine impact of each weakness they uncover.
Why Your Organisation Needs Penetration Testing
Most vulnerabilities aren’t obvious. Without regular testing, weaknesses can sit undetected in your systems for months or years, quietly increasing your exposure to ransomware, data breaches, and regulatory penalties.
Penetration testing helps you protect sensitive data, reduce the risk of a serious incident, meet compliance requirements including ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and Cyber Essentials, and demonstrate to your board, clients, and insurers that you take security seriously.
If you’re in the process of achieving compliance requirements such as for ISO 27001 or PCI-DSS, you will be able to show you are actively carrying out security testing in your organisation.
Our Testing Process
Scoping and Planning
We agree exactly what's in scope, what the objectives are, and how testing will be conducted.
Reconnaissance
We identify your attack surfaces using open-source intelligence and targeted scanning, the same way an real attacker would.
Exploitation
We attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities we find, with your knowledge and consent, to demonstrate real-world impact.
Post-Exploitation
We assess how far an attacker could move through your environment once they’ve gained initial access.
Reporting
You receive a clear, detailed report covering what we found, what it means, and what to do about it.
What We Test
We carry out penetration testing across internal and external networks, web applications and APIs, including Large-Language Model (LLM) implementations, cloud environments, mobile applications, and IoT and connected devices.
What You Receive
Every engagement report includes an executive summary written for non-technical leadership, detailed technical findings with evidence, a risk-prioritised list of issues, and clear remediation guidance for each finding. Should you choose to undergo a retest as part of your assessment, the report will be updated to reflect the applied remediations.
How Often Should You Test?
Most organisations should conduct penetration testing at least annually, after any significant changes to their systems or infrastructure, and ahead of compliance audits or certification renewals.
Pen Testing vs Vulnerability Assessment
Penetration testing goes further than a vulnerability assessment. Where a vulnerability assessment identifies weaknesses, penetration testing actively exploits them to show you what a time-limited attacker could achieve within the confines of the scope. Both have their place depending on your needs and maturity. (Compare the two services)
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on scope, but most engagements run from a few days to a couple of weeks. We’ll give you a clear timeframe during scoping.
We take care to minimise disruption throughout and do not actively test for vulnerabilities we know lead to significant disruptions, such as Denials of Service (DoS). Most organisations notice no impact at all during testing.
We’ll walk you through everything during scoping and discuss any pre-requisites with you prior to start of testing. Though each assessment is different, you can expect to provision testing accounts or support us to come on site for infrastructure testing.
Book a penetration test
Talk to our team about what you need and we’ll put together a scoping proposal.