Understanding Infrastructure Penetration Testing

Infrastructure penetration testing checks an organisation’s network and systems for security weaknesses. It’s like a simulated attack to find and fix potential entry points that hackers might use. By doing this test, companies can spot and solve security issues before real attackers do, making their systems safer and more secure against cyber threats.

External vs. Internal Infrastructure Penetration Tests

Criteria	External Infrastructure Penetration Test	Internal Infrastructure Penetration Test
Focus	Targets external-facing components: public websites, applications, and perimeter devices like firewalls.	Concentrates on the internal network: servers, databases, internal applications, and employee workstations.
Purpose	Evaluates security from external perspectives; identifies vulnerabilities for external attackers.	Fortifies boundary defences, prevents unauthorised external access, and secures public-facing assets.
Scope	Enhances detection of internal weaknesses, ensures robust internal controls, and reduces insider threats.	Simulates actions of authenticated users or compromised systems within the internal network.
Benefits	Fortifies boundary defences, prevents unauthorised external access, secures public-facing assets.	Fortifies boundary defences, prevents unauthorised external access, and secures public-facing assets.

How we differ

Tenendo dedicates most of the project to manual security testing and never fully relies on the output of automatic tools, allowing us to discover vulnerabilities missed by previous contractors or internal vulnerability assessments.

Vulnerabilities that we find are always used to make the attack simulation as accurate as possible by chaining them in a realistic attack scenario. Penetration testing results are never simply a list of vulnerabilities discovered and include complex exploitation chain analysis and scenario execution details, providing an overview of real-world risk for an application or infrastructure.

We also incorporate our red team operations knowledge in infrastructure penetration tests and vulnerability assessments, discovering applicable vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and security flaws to help harden the infrastructure against attacks that may be out of scope, like social engineering attacks.