In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, protecting your organization from cyber attacks is more important than ever. Traditional penetration testing (pentesting), although effective, often fails due to high costs, resource requirements, and infrequent implementation. Automated internal and external network pentesting is a game-changing solution that empowers organizations to stay ahead of attackers with cost-effective, frequent and thorough security assessments.
Strengthen Your Defenses: The Role of Internal and External Pentests
Effective cybersecurity requires dealing with threats both inside and outside your organization. Automated solutions streamline this process, allowing IT groups to implement a holistic and proactive defense strategy.
Internal Pentest: Core Provisioning
Internal pentesting simulates an attacker operating on your network, exposing vulnerabilities such as insider threats, compromised credentials, or intrusions through physical or remote access. The goal is to discover vulnerabilities that can be exploited after bypassing external defenses.
Key benefits of an internal pentest:
- Detection and elimination of insider threats: Quickly identify and remediate risks from attackers or compromised accounts.
- Check critical systems: Assess the security of major assets and critical systems such as file servers, Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange.
- Strengthening internal systems: Identify weak points in user permissions and improve network segmentation and system configuration to limit lateral movement of attackers in the network.
- Test incident response plans: Test the organization’s ability to detect, respond to, and resolve breaches that occur within the network.
- Meet the compliance requirements: For standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA and SOC2 etc.
External Pentesting: Perimeter Protection
External pentesting focuses on securing Internet systems such as websites, APIs, and email servers. These tests simulate the tactics of attackers trying to penetrate your network from the outside.
The main advantages of external pentesting are:
- Strengthen the perimeter defense: Secure firewalls, routers, and public systems to prevent unauthorized access.
- Discover exploitable vulnerabilities: Resolve issues such as unpatched software or incorrect configurations.
- Protect yourself from opportunistic attacks: Regular testing helps organizations stay ahead of automated scans and targeted attacks.
- Meet the compliance requirements: Standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 require external network audits twice a year.
Together, internal and external pentesting provides a 360-degree view of your organization’s security posture, allowing you to mitigate risks before they become actual breaches.
Why automation is the future of network pentesting
While traditional manual network pentesting has its advantages, it only gives you a snapshot of your risk as attackers and modern cyber threats evolve daily. Automated network pentesting solves these problems and offers a smarter and faster way to stay ahead:
- Economic efficiency: Traditional manual pentesting is often expensive, but automated solutions reduce the cost significantly. This makes regular, high-quality security assessments practical and affordable for organizations of all sizes, regardless of budget constraints.
- Increased frequency: Instead of annual audits, automation lets you test monthly or on demand, ensuring you’re always ready.
- Full Coverage: Automated solutions provide thorough and consistent results, identifying vulnerabilities that may be missed due to limited scope, time constraints, or human error during manual assessment.
- Useful information: Real-time results and detailed reports from automated solutions prioritize vulnerabilities and recommend remediation strategies, helping IT teams effectively address risks.
- Simplify compliance: Automated tools generate reports or have built-in 3rd party integration, making regulatory compliance easier and more efficient.
Automation in Action: Transforming the Pentesting Landscape
automated network pentesting solution from Vonahi Security, is changing the pentesting landscape by combining speed, accuracy and ease of use. Whether you’re an MSP or an internal IT team, vPenTest provides:
- Fast, accurate results: Run comprehensive network pentests in hours with real-time actionable information at your fingertips.
- Scalability: Adapts to both small networks and complex infrastructure.
- Ease of use: No special expertise required — vPenTest simplifies the process for IT teams.
- Savings of funds: Run frequent, high-quality pentests without spending money.
By automating your pentesting, vPenTest enables you to move from reactive to proactive security, ensuring that vulnerabilities are addressed before they can be exploited.
Key conclusions
Cyber threats are constantly evolving, making traditional annual network pentests insufficient to address vulnerabilities. Automated network pentesting solutions provide a consistent and effective way to stay ahead of attackers.
- Intranet pentesting: Protect your core systems from insider threats and lateral movement risks.
- Pentesting the external network: Secure your perimeter to prevent unauthorized access to public facilities.
- Advantages of automation: Consistent, thorough, and frequent pentesting reduces risk and improves your organization’s security.
Improve network security with automated pentesting
In today’s fast-paced digital environment, automated internal and external pentesting is a necessity, not a luxury. With automated solutions like vPenTest, staying ahead of attackers has never been easier. Make sure your network is secure, compliant and ready for whatever challenges lie ahead.
Do not wait for a breakthrough – Schedule a vPenTest demo today!
