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When you need it
The situations that bring teams to this engagement, and where it fits alongside the rest of your program.
Definition
External penetration testing is a manual attack on everything you expose to the internet, run from the outside with no credentials. Testers map your public hosts, VPN gateways, mail, and cloud edges, then try to turn what they find into a foothold. It answers one question: can an outsider get in?
One fixed price covers the whole perimeter, from $4,200 for a small footprint, with a free retest. See the external penetration testing price tiers, or pair it with an internal test as one network penetration testing service.
Compare
Three purchases that get confused. They answer different questions, and the price reflects the work.
External penetration test
Internal penetration test
Vulnerability scan
Most organizations start external, add the internal penetration test once the perimeter is mature, and run a validated vulnerability scan between tests. For the full picture of external and internal work together, read our infrastructure penetration testing guide and our network penetration testing guide.
What we look for
Your perimeter is the first thing an attacker sees. We probe every internet-facing system for the exposed services and misconfigurations that hand an outsider their first foothold.
Internet-facing services that should never be reachable from outside.
We test for
Missing patches on perimeter systems that attackers exploit first.
We test for
Weak access controls on VPNs, portals, and mail that open the door.
We test for
Configuration errors that hand an outside attacker an easy foothold.
We test for
The parts of your perimeter that no longer live in your data center, and that attackers find through search engines rather than port scans.
We test for
Discovery
Most external tests begin with the IP ranges you hand over. Ours begins with what an attacker can find: subdomains and forgotten hosts, cloud services registered by individual teams, staging environments left public, marketing microsites on third-party platforms, and credentials that have already leaked. The scope you give us is the floor, not the ceiling, and the assets you did not know about are where footholds usually come from.
Discovery draws on the same open-source intelligence and internet-wide scan data attackers use, and the results are reconciled with your inventory before exploitation starts, so you also come away with an accurate map of your perimeter. Our guide to external attack surface management explains how to keep that map current between tests.
Industries
The perimeter test is the same discipline everywhere; the evidence it has to produce is not.
Banks, fintechs, and insurers under NYDFS 23 NYCRR 500 need annual external testing from a qualified party, reported for examiners. We serve many of them from our office in Manhattan.
Hospitals, practices, and health-tech vendors need the perimeter around ePHI tested and mapped to the Security Rule, in Queens, Long Island, or anywhere in the country. New York general hospitals also owe an annual penetration test under the state’s hospital cybersecurity regulation.
Firms answering client security questionnaires need an independent perimeter test and a report their clients will accept. Read our guide to law firm penetration testing.
Product companies closing SOC 2 and enterprise reviews need the external test alongside application testing, often on a recurring cadence. See penetration testing for SaaS companies.
Methodology
Every engagement follows the Penetration Testing Execution Standard and the relevant OWASP guides.
These are the phases your external network penetration testing runs through.
DNS, certificate logs, and internet-wide scan data find the hosts you did not list. You get a reconciled asset inventory.
Every open port and service fingerprinted, with versions and TLS settings. You get the exposed-service list.
VPN, mail, and single sign-on tested for MFA gaps and weak passwords, under your lockout limits.
Reachable weaknesses exploited within the rules of engagement. You get proof of concept per finding.
Attack narrative, CVSS-rated findings, and a free retest, with an attestation letter.
How it works
From scope through the final retest, your team stays in the loop at every step, with findings tracked live in our platform.
Scope & kickoff
Targets, roles, and rules of engagement defined in writing, with a fixed scope and timeline.
Testing goes live
Findings post to your live platform dashboard the moment our testers confirm them.
Track remediation
Follow every finding from open to fixed, with severity, evidence, and status in one place.
Report & retest
Executive and technical reports land, then request a free retest in one click.
Compliance
Findings are mapped to the requirement or control they evidence, so the same report serves your auditor, your customers, and your engineers.
Proof
Every engagement is confidential, so the work below is anonymized to sector and engagement type.
Free
Retest on every penetration test
185+
Years combined experience
14
Senior in-house specialists
24h
Onboarding after signing
Higher Education
Credential-Harvesting Phishing
Using a seasonal pretext, an SSO look-alike domain, and abuse of a legitimate mail-platform send feature, the campaign reached inboxes and captured SSO credentials.
Outcome. Demonstrated a credible path to SSO account takeover and drove improvements to email authentication, look-alike domain monitoring, password policy, and targeted training.
100+
Staff targeted
20%
Credentials captured
Exec
Accounts affected
Fintech · Payments
Web Application Penetration Test
Critical: a remote code execution flaw in the application’s web framework that could have given an attacker full control of the server. We escalated it to the development team while the test was still running.
Outcome. The critical RCE was reported and remediated during the engagement via an emergency framework upgrade, which also closed the server-side request forgery, and the remaining findings were retested to confirmation.
1
Critical (RCE)
Mid-test
Critical remediated
2
High
Resources
External vs Internal Penetration Testing: What's the Difference?
External penetration testing attacks your perimeter from outside; internal testing starts from a foothold inside. What each finds, and when you need both.
Firewall Penetration Testing: What It Covers
Firewall penetration testing explained: external exposure, segmentation between zones, attacker-side rule review and PCI DSS segmentation tests, with costs.
External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Explained
What external attack surface management (EASM) is, why your internet-facing footprint keeps growing, and how it works alongside penetration testing.
Want to see a report first?
Read a sample report for a fictional client, or request a redacted one from a real engagement. Our guide explains what a penetration testing report should contain.
FAQ
What teams most often ask before scoping
external network penetration testing.
External penetration testing is a security assessment of everything your organization exposes to the internet, performed from the perspective of an outside attacker with no access. Testers map your public footprint, probe the exposed services, and attempt to gain a foothold the same way a real adversary would. It is usually the first test organizations run, because the perimeter is what attackers reach first.
External testing assesses your internet-facing systems the way an outside attacker sees them, looking for the first foothold. Internal testing simulates an attacker who is already inside and tests how far they can spread. Many organizations run both for full coverage.
Typically your public IP ranges, VPNs, mail servers, exposed management interfaces, and other internet-facing infrastructure. We confirm the exact scope with you before testing begins.
Most engagements run about one week depending on the size of your external footprint, followed by reporting and a complimentary retest.
At least annually, and after any significant change to your perimeter: new public-facing applications, VPN or firewall changes, a cloud migration, or a merger. Many compliance frameworks (PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001) expect annual external network penetration testing at minimum, and quarterly external vulnerability scanning between tests keeps the window of exposure short.
Yes. A vulnerability scan is automated: it enumerates known weaknesses and produces a raw list. External network penetration testing is human-led: our testers validate which findings are actually exploitable, chain them the way a real attacker would, and prove impact, so you spend remediation time on the exposures that genuinely put you at risk rather than on scanner noise. Our guide to the types of network security assessment compares the scan, the assessment, and the test side by side.
External network penetration tests start at $4,200, fixed before work begins, with a free retest of remediated findings included. Larger external footprints are quoted after scoping. Starting prices for every service are on our pricing page.
Yes, where you approve it, because password spraying against VPN, mail, and single sign-on portals is how most real perimeter breaches start. We agree the rules in writing first: which services are in scope, rate limits that stay under your lockout thresholds, testing windows, and the point of contact for immediate escalation. Nothing destructive, no denial of service, and every credential we obtain is handled under NDA and destroyed after the retest.
From Invadel-controlled infrastructure with fixed source addresses that we share before testing, so your security team can distinguish our traffic from real attacks and, if you choose, watch how your monitoring responds. We can test from US or international vantage points where geo-blocking is part of your defenses.
Usually, yes. Insurers increasingly ask whether an independent external penetration test was performed in the last twelve months and whether critical findings were remediated. Our report and the retest evidence answer both, and the executive summary is written for the underwriter as much as for your engineers. Our guide to cyber insurance penetration testing matches each application question to the test that answers it.
Firewall testing is part of an external network penetration test, from $4,200 with a free retest. We test the firewall from the side an attacker sees: what it exposes, what its management and VPN interfaces accept, and which rules let through traffic that should be blocked. Segmentation rules inside the network are tested in an internal test, from $6,000. Our firewall penetration testing guide explains what each view covers.
The same engagement goes by several names: external pentest, external network pentest, external infrastructure penetration testing, perimeter test, or external penetration testing services. All of them mean a manual, attacker-style test of everything you expose to the internet, and ours always includes discovery of assets outside the list you hand us, exploitation of anything reachable within agreed rules, an executive and technical report, and a free retest. What changes between quotes is the size of the perimeter, which is why the price tiers are published by the number of live hosts.
Talk to our team about scoping external network penetration testing.
Prefer the full scoping questionnaire?Tell us what you need tested. We reply within one business day.
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