Penetration Testing

Penetration testing simulates real-world attacks to uncover vulnerabilities, ensuring your organisation’s defences are robust against potential threats. This proactive approach helps identify and address weaknesses before malicious actors can exploit them.

By evaluating your security measures, penetration testing provides a clear understanding of your organisation’s overall security stance. It reveals how well your systems, networks, and applications can withstand targeted attacks, and that known and unknown vulnerabilities are protected against.

Penetration testing helps your organisation meet industry standards and regulatory requirements by identifying gaps in your security measures. It ensures that your organisation adheres to compliance frameworks like HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS.

Penetration testing delivers detailed reports outlining vulnerabilities, their impact, and recommended remediation steps. These actionable insights enable your organisation to prioritise and address security issues effectively. Goaco presents our reports using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to deliver a recognised structure.

External penetration testers bring specialised skills and knowledge, leveraging the latest tools and techniques to uncover vulnerabilities that may be missed by internal teams. Their objective perspective enhances the effectiveness of the security assessment.

Penetration testing raises awareness of potential threats, helping your organisation stay informed about emerging risks and evolving attack methods. This awareness is crucial for maintaining a proactive security posture.

Penetration testing reveals vulnerabilities in your systems, application configurations and infrastructure. It also identifies actions and habits of your staff that could lead to data breaches and malware infiltration. Pen testers try to exploit weaknesses enabling you to see what a hacker could do in the ‘real world’.

Investing in penetration testing can prevent costly breaches and data loss, saving your organisation from financial penalties, legal fees, and the expense of remediation efforts after an attack.

Every cyber-attack will have a negative impact on your business. A pen test will reveal potential threats and help to ensure that your operations don’t suffer damage to costs and reputation. This involves a detailed report explaining your security weaknesses so you know what improvements to consider improving your businesses cyber-security.

Your legal compliance requirements may necessitate a level of penetration testing. The ISO 27001 standard requires all managers/system owners to conduct regular penetration tests and security reviews, with skilled third-party testers.

A cyber-attack or data breach can have a negative impact on the confidence and loyalty of your customers, suppliers and stakeholders. If your business is known for its systematic security audits and pen tests, you will maintain the trust and confidence from your customers and clients.

Conducting a penetration test from an external provider will offer unbiased insights and identifies vulnerabilities overlooked internally. This strengthens security, reduces risk, and ensures compliance with industry standards.

Outline the objectives and strategy for the penetration test, ensuring alignment with your organisation’s security goals.

Define the boundaries and extent of the testing, identifying the systems, networks, and applications to be evaluated.

Execute the penetration test by simulating real-world attacks to uncover vulnerabilities within the scoped areas.

Address the identified vulnerabilities by implementing the necessary security measures and fixes.

Conduct a follow-up test to verify that the remediation efforts have effectively resolved the vulnerabilities.

Regularly repeat the testing process to ensure continuous security improvement and adaptation to emerging threats.