Black Box Penetration Testing

As ethical hackers, we emulate an attacker by utilizing similar techniques to perform reconnaissance, identify vulnerabilities, and break into your systems.  Unlike an attacker, however, we stop our test before exposing sensitive data or doing harm to your environment.  With a Black Box Penetration Test we have unauthenticated access and have little prior knowledge, except the IP Address, domain name, or URL, about the systems in scope.

A Black Box Penetration Test is commonly used as an external penetration test against an organization’s Internet-facing systems, such as the following:

We have performed many external Black Box Penetration Tests against the above systems.

We’ve also performed Black Box Penetration Tests against embedded systems and LRUs (Line Replaceable Units) that integrate into larger systems, such as commercial aircraft, weapon systems, or SCADA/ICS systems. A few examples of what we’ve tested:

We follow a seven phase methodology designed to maximize our efficiency, minimize risk, and provide complete and accurate results. The overarching seven phases of the methodology are:

We think it is better to have an ethical hacker find the holes into your enterprise than an adversary.  Our Black Box Penetration Testing provides details on exploitable vulnerabilities in a prioritized, tangible manner.  Our report allows you to better understand what your environment looks like from an attacker perspective.  This helps you prioritize efforts to mitigate risk to reduce breach likelihood or damage.

Not only do our Black Box Penetration Testing Services show you what your attack surface looks like to an adversary attacker, but they can be used as a safe way to test your organization’s Incident Response (IR) and digital forensics capabilities.  Our Penetration Testing services can be used to tune and test your security controls, such as your IDS, Firewall, Endpoint Security, Router ACLs, etc.

Our Penetration Testing services also help you meet compliance audit requirements such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and FISMA

The Penetration Test Report includes IP addresses tested, vulnerabilities discovered, steps taken during the assessment, exploitable areas discovered, and prioritized recommendations.  For any systems we are able to exploit, an “Attack Narrative” section is used to discuss step-by-step the process we used to gain access, escalate privileges, etc.

The report sample below is used as a quick reference to focus remediation and mitigation efforts on. The findings are ranked by risk rating and include recommendations (rec), reference links for mitigation steps, and tester notes.

Contact Us or use the form below for more information about our Black Box Penetration Testing Services or to schedule a penetration test.