Network Penetration Testing

What is a network penetration test?

A network penetration test is a hands-on attempt to break into your network. A tester hunts for misconfigurations, weak credentials, unpatched services and Active Directory weaknesses, then exploits them to see where they lead. The point is to answer one question: if an attacker went after your organization, how far would they get?

External or Internal: which one do you need?

Most clients ask this first. The two tests start from different places.

• External. We start on the internet with nothing but your public IP ranges and domains, the same position as any attacker. We go after your firewalls, VPN, remote access portals, email services and anything else you expose, and try to turn them into a foothold.
• Internal. We start inside your network, as if an attacker already phished an employee or plugged into an open network jack in a conference room. From there we work toward the crown jewels of your organization: Domain Admin accounts, sensitive file shares and the mission-critical systems that run your business.

If you can only do one, the external test tells you whether someone can get in. The internal test tells you what happens once they do, and that's where the most serious findings tend to turn up. Plenty of organizations run both in the same engagement.

What does testing actually involve?

Every engagement starts with scoping. We agree on the IP ranges, domains and network segments in play, what stays off limits, and a testing window. Then the work starts: discovery, enumeration, exploitation, lateral movement, and privilege escalation. That work includes cracking weak passwords, abusing misconfigured services, moving between systems and chaining several medium findings into critical attack paths.

Every pentest includes a vulnerability scan, but we don't lean on the scanner for findings. Scanners miss the problems that matter most on internal networks, like a service account with a guessable password or a permission that lets a help desk account reset an administrator's password. Vulnerability scans also do not provide meaningfully tailored severity rankings for findings.

Will testing disrupt our network?

We test production environments carefully. We skip denial-of-service attacks, we check with you before anything that carries real risk, and you get a named contact and an emergency stop procedure before day one. If something looks wrong, you can call the person running the test directly, because that's the same person you scoped it with.

How long does it take, and what does it cost?

Most engagements run one to three weeks, depending on the size of the environment and whether you want external, internal or both. You give us a window and we set exact dates inside it, so testing never collides with a migration or a big deployment.

Price follows scope. The number of external IP addresses, the size of the internal network and the number of sites all drive the effort. We don't publish a price list, because two 500-person companies can have very different networks. Red Raine Labs is owner-operated, so you pay for testing, not for a sales team and an account management layer.

What do we get at the end?

Among many forms of documentation, you receive the core PDF report written for two audiences. Leadership gets a plain-language summary of the risk and what it means for the business. Your IT team gets every finding with evidence, the attack path it belongs to and a specific, prioritized fix. A certified tester validates every finding, so your team won't burn a week chasing false positives. Then we walk you through the report so your team can ask questions before they start fixing things.

Related services and reading

• Active Directory Security Assessment: a full review of the directory.
• Pentest vs Vuln Scan: what each one actually tells you, and which one you need.
• How to prepare for a penetration test: a free checklist that walks your team through scope, timing and rules of engagement.
• Michigan penetration testing: how we test organizations across the state, remotely or on-site.
• Comparing penetration testing companies: where most vendors fall short, and how we handle it.