Penetration Testing Services Comparison: What is an External Pen Test?

What is an external pen test?

In the video below, Mike continues his video series on penetration testing services comparisons… this time explaining an external pen test, and how it compares to the other 3 types.

Want Mike’s recommendations on the best penetration testing companies? Click the button below and ask him today.

About Mike

Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Your company is looking into penetration testing. Maybe it’s for an audit. Maybe it’s for an insurance policy. Maybe it’s just for good best practices for cyber security.

But no matter what, you’re wondering, how do we go about it? Where do we start?

Well, you might want to reference some of my other videos as far as where penetration testing lands in the scope of things. I feel it’s one of the last things you should be doing, not one of the first things. You can watch my video on that.

You could also watch my video on gray box, white box, or black box penetration testing. But what I want to talk to you is about the four different categories of penetration testing and that’s external, internal, social engineering, and physical security. So I feel that those are four main categories of penetration testing. So today, really quickly, I wanted to explain what external penetration testing is.

Shortcut to your answers

But before I get started, really quick, if you want to know which penetration testing companies you should be quoting for your organization, don’t Google it. Just contact me via email or phone (714.593.0011). More information on that at the end of the video.

What is External Penetration Testing?

So what is external penetration testing? Well, really quickly, it is just testing external applications in order to see what your vulnerabilities are. So this might be doing penetration testing on firewalls, servers, web applications, things like that, anything external of your organization out there on the internet.

So sometimes you’ll see web applications actually listed as a separate category, but for sake of simplicity, I’m including that in external penetration testing. So when you go to do penetration testing, you want to know, what type of external penetration testing should we be doing? Internal? Should we be doing some social engineering, penetration testing? And should we be doing some physical security penetration testing, categorizing it in those four?

External? You want to think about those things. What web applications are out there? What servers are out there on the web? What firewalls do we have outside of our organization sitting around? Anything on the perimeter is what you want to think about. That’s external penetration testing. To know more about what the other categories include, watch my other videos. But I hope that was helpful, really short video and just explaining that a little bit.

Want more recommendations on Penetration Testing services?

But if you want to know which service providers you should be reaching out to, to get quotes for penetration testing, again, don’t Google it. Don’t research on the internet for hours. You’ll probably end up with the wrong vendors anyway.

Just reach out and email or call me (714.593.0011). I’ve been doing this for 18, 19 years. I know all of the vendors out there, and based on a few questions about your company, I can tell you the best handful of companies that you should be quoting and why. And the nice thing is, I don’t charge you a dime for my services. The service providers themselves actually pay our broker fee. So no excuse not to reach out and contact me. I’m happy to help you. I love talking about this stuff and I will catch you on the next video.

Hey, don’t forget to like the video, if you thought it was useful, and also subscribe to the channel so we can get rid of the advertisements. Catch you on the next one.