External network penetration testing simulates real-world attacks against your internet-facing infrastructure from the perspective of an outside attacker who has no prior knowledge of your internal systems. This is the most fundamental form of security testing and is required by virtually every compliance framework, including PCI DSS, HIPAA, CMMC, SOC 2, and ISO 27001. Our external penetration testing engagements are designed to identify vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to your network, compromise sensitive data, or disrupt your business operations.

Our external penetration testing process begins with open-source intelligence (OSINT) gathering, where we enumerate publicly available information about your organization, including domain registrations, DNS records, email addresses, leaked credentials, exposed documents, and social media intelligence. This reconnaissance phase mirrors exactly what a motivated attacker would do before launching a targeted attack against your organization. We then proceed to active scanning and enumeration, probing your external perimeter for open ports, running services, software versions, and known vulnerabilities. Every service exposed to the internet represents a potential entry point that must be evaluated for security weaknesses.

The exploitation phase is where our testers manually attempt to compromise identified vulnerabilities. This goes far beyond running automated exploit tools. Our certified penetration testers chain together multiple lower-severity findings to achieve significant impact, test for business logic flaws that scanners cannot identify, and attempt to escalate privileges and pivot deeper into your infrastructure when initial access is achieved. We document every step with screenshots, packet captures, and detailed technical descriptions so your team can reproduce and verify each finding.

Common findings in external penetration tests include outdated software with known exploits, misconfigured TLS and SSL implementations, exposed administrative interfaces, weak authentication mechanisms, information disclosure vulnerabilities, missing security headers, DNS zone transfer vulnerabilities, and insecure remote access configurations. Each finding is rated for severity based on exploitability, impact, and business context, with clear remediation steps provided for every issue.

Internal network penetration testing evaluates your security posture from the perspective of an attacker who has already gained initial access to your internal network. This scenario is critically important because many of the most damaging breaches involve insiders, compromised employee credentials, or attackers who have bypassed perimeter defenses through phishing or other social engineering techniques. Once an attacker is inside your network, the question becomes how far they can go and how much damage they can cause before being detected and stopped.

Our internal penetration testing engagements typically begin with our tester connecting to your network as an unprivileged user, simulating the access level of a compromised employee workstation or a guest on your wireless network. From this starting position, we systematically enumerate Active Directory structures, identify misconfigured group policies, discover unpatched systems, locate sensitive data shares with excessive permissions, and test network segmentation controls that should prevent lateral movement between security zones.

Active Directory environments are a primary focus area because they represent the backbone of identity and access management for most organizations. Our testers look for Kerberoasting opportunities, AS-REP roasting, LLMNR and NBT-NS poisoning, NTLM relay attacks, delegation abuse, certificate services misconfigurations, GPO abuse paths, and other Active Directory-specific attack techniques that are commonly exploited in real-world breaches. These attack paths can allow an attacker to escalate from a standard user account to domain administrator privileges, effectively giving them complete control over your entire IT environment.

We also evaluate your organization's detection and response capabilities during internal testing. Can your security operations center or managed detection and response provider detect our activities? How quickly do they respond? Are alerts properly configured for the types of lateral movement and privilege escalation techniques we are using? These observations provide valuable feedback on the effectiveness of your monitoring and incident response capabilities, helping you understand not just whether an attacker could compromise your systems, but whether your team would notice and respond effectively.

Web application penetration testing is a specialized discipline that evaluates the security of your web-based applications, APIs, portals, and web services. With organizations increasingly relying on web applications for customer-facing services, internal business processes, partner integrations, and e-commerce transactions, the security of these applications directly impacts your organization's overall risk posture. A single vulnerability in a critical web application can expose customer data, compromise financial transactions, or provide a foothold for deeper network intrusion.

Our web application testing methodology is based on the OWASP Testing Guide and covers all categories of the OWASP Top 10, including injection flaws such as SQL injection, NoSQL injection, LDAP injection, and command injection. We test for broken authentication and session management vulnerabilities, cross-site scripting in all its forms including reflected, stored, and DOM-based XSS, insecure direct object references, security misconfigurations, sensitive data exposure, missing function-level access controls, cross-site request forgery, server-side request forgery, and the use of components with known vulnerabilities.

Beyond the OWASP Top 10, we test for business logic vulnerabilities that are unique to your application's workflow. These include price manipulation in e-commerce applications, privilege escalation through parameter tampering, race conditions in transaction processing, insecure file upload handling, information leakage through error messages and debug output, and authentication bypass techniques. Business logic flaws are particularly dangerous because they cannot be detected by automated scanners and require a human tester who understands the application's intended behavior to identify deviations that an attacker could exploit.

For API testing, we evaluate RESTful APIs, GraphQL endpoints, SOAP web services, and WebSocket implementations for authentication weaknesses, authorization bypass, excessive data exposure, rate limiting deficiencies, input validation failures, and improper error handling. Our reports include detailed proof-of-concept demonstrations for each finding, along with specific code-level remediation recommendations that your development team can implement during their next sprint cycle.

Red team engagements represent the most comprehensive and realistic form of security testing available. Unlike traditional penetration testing, which focuses on finding as many vulnerabilities as possible within a defined scope, red team operations simulate realistic adversary behavior with specific objectives such as gaining access to sensitive data, compromising executive email accounts, or achieving domain administrator access. Red team exercises test not just your technical controls, but your entire security program including people, processes, and technology working together as an integrated defense.

Our red team methodology is modeled on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, which catalogs real-world adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). We plan our campaigns around threat actors relevant to your industry and threat model. For example, a defense contractor would face simulated attacks modeled on nation-state APT groups known to target the defense industrial base, while a healthcare organization would face attacks modeled on financially motivated threat actors who target protected health information for identity theft and insurance fraud.

A typical red team engagement unfolds over weeks or months and may include custom phishing campaigns designed to capture employee credentials, physical security assessments including tailgating and badge cloning, wireless network attacks, custom malware development to test endpoint detection capabilities, lateral movement through your network using techniques that closely mirror real attacker behavior, data exfiltration testing to evaluate data loss prevention controls, and persistence mechanisms to test whether your security team can detect and eradicate an established foothold. Throughout the engagement, we coordinate closely with your designated points of contact to ensure safety while maintaining operational security.

At the conclusion of a red team engagement, we deliver a comprehensive narrative report that tells the story of the attack campaign from start to finish, including initial access vectors, privilege escalation paths, lateral movement techniques, objectives achieved, and detection gaps. We also conduct a purple team debrief session where our red team works alongside your blue team (defensive security staff) to review each phase of the engagement, discussing what was detected, what was missed, and specific improvements to detection rules, response procedures, and security controls that would improve your defensive posture against similar attacks in the future.

Vulnerability assessment is the foundation of any effective security testing program. While penetration testing provides point-in-time depth, vulnerability assessment and management provides ongoing breadth across your entire IT environment. Our vulnerability management program combines automated scanning with expert analysis to give your organization continuous visibility into your security posture, enabling you to identify and remediate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. This approach is essential for maintaining compliance with frameworks like CMMC, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and NIST 800-171, all of which require regular vulnerability scanning as a baseline control.

Our vulnerability assessment service begins with comprehensive asset discovery to ensure we are scanning your complete environment, not just the systems you know about. Shadow IT, forgotten test servers, unauthorized cloud instances, and unmanaged IoT devices are common sources of undetected vulnerabilities. We deploy authenticated and unauthenticated scanning across your network infrastructure, servers, workstations, network devices, cloud environments, and web applications using enterprise-grade scanning platforms that we configure and tune for your specific environment.

Raw vulnerability scan results are notoriously noisy, generating thousands of findings that can overwhelm security teams. Our analysts manually review and validate scan results, eliminating false positives, confirming true positives, correlating findings across multiple sources, and adding business context to each vulnerability. We prioritize findings based on a combination of technical severity (CVSS score), exploitability (is there a public exploit available?), exposure (is the vulnerable system internet-facing or internal?), and business impact (what data or systems are at risk if this vulnerability is exploited?). This risk-based prioritization ensures your remediation efforts focus on the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest actual risk to your organization.

For organizations that need ongoing vulnerability management, we offer continuous scanning programs with monthly or quarterly scan cycles, trend reporting that tracks your vulnerability posture over time, SLA tracking for remediation timelines, and integration with your IT ticketing system to streamline the remediation workflow. Our vulnerability management service transforms what is often a reactive, compliance-driven exercise into a proactive risk management discipline that demonstrably improves your security posture over time.

Social engineering remains the most effective attack vector for initial compromise in the vast majority of successful data breaches. No matter how robust your technical controls are, your organization remains vulnerable if your employees can be tricked into clicking malicious links, opening weaponized attachments, disclosing credentials, or granting physical access to unauthorized individuals. Our social engineering assessments test the human element of your security program, measuring employee susceptibility to the same techniques real attackers use and providing the data needed to improve your security awareness training program.

Our phishing assessments range from broad-based campaigns that test your entire workforce to highly targeted spear-phishing scenarios designed to compromise specific high-value targets such as executives, finance staff, or system administrators. We design custom phishing emails that match the sophistication level appropriate for your assessment goals, ranging from generic credential harvesting pages to convincing replicas of internal tools and business partner communications. We track metrics including click rates, credential submission rates, attachment open rates, and reporting rates to measure both susceptibility and security awareness.

Beyond email phishing, we offer voice phishing (vishing) assessments where our testers call employees posing as IT support, vendors, or other trusted parties to extract sensitive information or convince them to perform actions that compromise security. We also conduct SMS phishing (smishing) campaigns and, for organizations that need it, physical social engineering assessments that test badge access controls, clean desk policies, and employee willingness to challenge unauthorized individuals in secure areas. Each of these attack vectors targets a different set of human behaviors and provides unique insights into your organization's security culture.

Every social engineering assessment concludes with a comprehensive report that provides aggregate statistics across the entire campaign, individual department breakdowns to identify groups that need additional training, anonymized examples of the most concerning employee responses, and specific recommendations for improving your security awareness training program. We never use assessment results to punish individual employees. The goal is always to strengthen organizational security culture by identifying knowledge gaps and providing targeted training to address them.

Wireless network security testing evaluates the security of your Wi-Fi infrastructure, including corporate wireless networks, guest networks, IoT networks, and any rogue access points that may be operating without your knowledge. Wireless networks extend your security perimeter beyond the physical walls of your facility, creating attack vectors that can be exploited from parking lots, neighboring buildings, or even drive-by attackers. Many organizations invest heavily in securing their wired network perimeter while overlooking wireless security gaps that provide an equally viable path for unauthorized access.

Our wireless security testing includes enumeration of all wireless networks broadcasting from your facilities, including hidden SSIDs, identification of rogue access points and unauthorized wireless devices, testing of wireless authentication mechanisms including WPA2-Enterprise, WPA3, certificate-based authentication, and RADIUS configurations, evaluation of wireless network segmentation to ensure guest and IoT networks cannot reach corporate resources, evil twin and captive portal attacks to test employee behavior when presented with spoofed wireless networks, and assessment of wireless intrusion detection and prevention system effectiveness.

We test from multiple physical locations around your facility to simulate attackers operating from different vantage points and assess the extent of your wireless signal coverage. Our reports include heat maps showing signal coverage, identification of all detected wireless devices and networks, technical findings with exploitation details, and recommendations for hardening your wireless infrastructure against the specific attack techniques demonstrated during testing.

Cloud security assessments evaluate the security posture of your cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and hybrid environments. The shared responsibility model of cloud computing means that while cloud providers secure the underlying infrastructure, your organization is responsible for securing the configuration, access management, data protection, and workloads running in the cloud. Misconfigurations in cloud environments are a leading cause of data breaches, and the dynamic nature of cloud infrastructure means that new vulnerabilities can be introduced with every configuration change, deployment, or resource provisioning event.

Our cloud security assessments cover identity and access management (IAM) policies and role configurations, storage bucket and blob access controls, network security group and firewall rules, encryption at rest and in transit configurations, logging and monitoring configurations, serverless function security, container and Kubernetes security, infrastructure-as-code template reviews, and compliance with cloud-specific benchmarks such as CIS Benchmarks for AWS, Azure, and GCP. We identify over-permissive IAM policies, publicly accessible storage buckets, unencrypted data stores, missing audit logging, and insecure default configurations that are common sources of cloud security incidents.

For organizations with multi-cloud or hybrid environments, we evaluate the security of interconnections between cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure, assess consistency of security controls across platforms, and identify gaps in visibility that could allow attackers to move laterally between environments. Our cloud security reports include specific configuration changes needed to remediate each finding, mapped to the relevant compliance requirements for frameworks including SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and CMMC.

The recommended frequency depends on your industry, compliance requirements, and risk profile. PCI DSS requires annual penetration testing and quarterly vulnerability scanning at minimum. CMMC and HIPAA require regular security assessments, with most organizations conducting annual penetration tests and quarterly or monthly vulnerability scans. Beyond compliance minimums, best practice recommends testing after any significant infrastructure change, application deployment, merger or acquisition, or security incident. Organizations with high-risk environments or rapidly changing infrastructure should consider semi-annual penetration testing supplemented by continuous vulnerability management. Petronella Technology Group, Inc. can help you determine the appropriate testing frequency based on your specific regulatory requirements and risk tolerance.

We design our testing engagements to minimize business disruption. During the scoping phase, we work with your team to identify critical systems, peak business hours, and any testing restrictions. We establish rules of engagement that define acceptable testing boundaries, and our testers are trained to avoid denial-of-service conditions and other disruptive techniques unless specifically authorized. For production systems, we often recommend testing during off-peak hours or against staging environments. That said, some level of risk is inherent in active testing, which is why we carry professional liability insurance and have incident response procedures in place for the rare case when testing causes an unintended service impact.

A penetration test focuses on finding as many vulnerabilities as possible within a defined scope and timeframe, typically one to two weeks. The scope is clearly defined, and the goal is comprehensive vulnerability discovery. A red team engagement simulates a realistic adversary campaign over weeks or months with specific objectives, testing not just technical controls but people and processes. Red team operations use stealth, multiple attack vectors including social engineering and physical security testing, and attempt to avoid detection. Red teams test your security program holistically, while penetration tests focus on technical vulnerability discovery. Most organizations benefit from regular penetration tests supplemented by periodic red team engagements for a comprehensive view of their security posture.

Yes, cloud security assessment is a core part of our testing portfolio. We evaluate AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments for misconfigurations, excessive IAM permissions, insecure storage configurations, network security gaps, and compliance deficiencies. Cloud testing requires specialized expertise because the attack surface and security model differ significantly from traditional on-premises environments. We test within the boundaries of each cloud provider's acceptable use policy and coordinate with providers when required. Our cloud security assessments cover infrastructure configuration, identity and access management, data protection, network security, logging and monitoring, and workload security.

Through our partner network, PTG engagements have access to professionals holding industry-recognized certifications including Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), GIAC Penetration Tester (GPEN), GIAC Exploit Researcher and Advanced Penetration Tester (GXPN), CompTIA PenTest+, and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). All PTG employees are CMMC Registered Practitioners. Our founder, Craig Petronella, is a Licensed Digital Forensic Examiner with over 25 years of cybersecurity experience. We require our testing partners to maintain active certifications and invest in ongoing training to stay current with evolving attack techniques and testing methodologies.

Timeline varies based on scope and complexity. A focused external network penetration test for a small environment might take three to five business days of active testing. A comprehensive internal and external penetration test for a mid-sized organization typically takes one to two weeks. Web application penetration tests vary from one to three weeks depending on application complexity. Red team engagements typically span two to six weeks of active operations. After active testing concludes, allow an additional one to two weeks for report preparation and quality assurance review. We provide detailed timeline estimates during the scoping phase so you can plan accordingly.

The information required depends on the type of test and whether it is a black-box (no prior knowledge), gray-box (limited knowledge), or white-box (full knowledge) engagement. For black-box external testing, we may only need your company name and approval to test. For gray-box and white-box testing, we typically request IP ranges, application URLs, user accounts with different privilege levels, network diagrams, system documentation, and previous security assessment reports. We also need signed authorization to test, emergency contact information, testing windows, and any systems or techniques that should be excluded from scope. We provide a detailed questionnaire during the scoping phase to collect all necessary information.

Yes, remediation support is a key differentiator of working with Petronella Technology Group, Inc.. Unlike testing-only firms, we offer a full range of cybersecurity and IT services that can help you fix the issues we find. Our reports include specific, actionable remediation guidance for every finding. After the findings debrief, our team is available for follow-up consultations to help your IT staff understand and implement fixes. For organizations that need hands-on remediation assistance, our managed IT services team can implement security hardening, patch management, configuration changes, and architectural improvements. We also offer remediation verification retesting to confirm that fixes have been successfully implemented.