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Top penetration testing companies provide comprehensive penetration testing services utilizing real-world tools, and manual methods, tactics and techniques to assess the security and defense capabilities of your environment.
The best penetration testing services recognize the business needs of the organization and the critical nature of its processes and operations while assuming the role of a malicious actor attacking the environment.
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Three Reasons To Choose:
Birch Cline is the awarded TIPS vendor of cybersecurity services, allowing government agencies and participating organizations to quickly purchase services that include penetration testing, without the delay and expense of going out to bid, with confidence by working with an established top penetration testing services provider.
Trained Professionals. FBI Background Tested.
Highly trained ethical hackers perform Birch Cline's penetration testing services with FBI background certification in compliance with CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services). Birch Cline penetration testers are experienced professionals who understand your business as well as the tactics and techniques utilized by current-day bad actors.
Birch Cline's penetration testers are professionals who understand the security and compliance needs as well as the business drivers that motivate organizations to trust Birch Cline to be their trusted cybersecurity partner.
Comprehensive Reporting. Business Value Driven.
Birch Cline delivers detailed reporting at the conclusion of the penetration testing process that focuses not only on test findings and the resulting recommendations, but also a comprehensive conveyance of identified risk in business vernacular. The Executive Summary portion of a Birch Cline penetration test report delivers clear business value in what other top penetration testing vendors deliver as a complex and often underutilized document.
Globally Ranked
Managed Security Services Provider by MSSPAlert.
Named Top Ten Vulnerability Management Company by Enterprise Security Magazine.
Named Top 25
Cyber Security Company by CIO Application Magazine.
To Choose Birch Cline
What is Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing, or "pentesting", is the simulation of various real-world attacks authorized by the targeted organization to test its cyber defense, preparedness and response capabilities in a controlled, ethical environment.
Carried out under regulated conditions, Birch Cline delivers the best penetration testing services that are designed to expose vulnerabilities, methods and techniques that could possibly be leveraged to exploit your critical defenses and then provide comprehensive recommendations to reduce organizational risk.
Penetration testing services, when performed correctly, will provide detailed recommendations to enable an organization to remediate, plan and implement countermeasures to prevent real world exploitation.
Benefits of Penetration Testing
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When delivered by experienced cybersecurity professionals, the best penetration testing companies give you an attacker's view of your environment utilizing safe and controlled processes. This unique perspective allows an organization to fully understand its weaknesses, vulnerabilities and to gain an appreciation for the ways in which an attacker would likely target their environment.
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As a top penetration testing service, Birch Cline utilizes the same tools as real-world attackers to closely emulating the latest tactics and techniques to not only identify vulnerabilities of a network, but to also provide an understand of how an attacker would go about exploiting that vulnerability as well as the level to which it could be exploited to gain unauthorized access.
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Finally, the greatest benefit and value differentiator in choosing an established, experienced top penetration testing service provider, like Birch Cline, is the professional business driven, comprehensive reporting and recommendations for remediation. The only asset an organization will have after the penetration test is performed, is the report. To provide maximum business value, the report should be focused on detailed explanation of identified risk identified, candid explanation of how and why the finding should be considered a risk, and best practice recommendations for remediation that include real world context with consideration of fiscal and business responsibility.
Contact us today and find out why Birch Cline is trusted to deliver the best penetration testing services in Dallas and across the state of Texas, from California and Nevada, to Colorado, Louisiana, Florida and is trusted to provide managed cybersecurity services to organizations of all sizes across the North America.
Types of Penetration Testing
The breadth of services and capabilities offered by top penetration testing companies commonly include: Internal Penetration Testing, External Penetration Testing, Wireless Penetration Testing and Application Penetration Testing and can be delivered in various forms of “white” or “black” box testing, terms which refer to the extent of prior knowledge the penetration testing provider has of the environment or target of the assessment.
Additional offerings often include Red Team Assessments, which are typically broader in scope, focusing and window of opportunity and more closely reflect a targeted real-world attack.
INTERNAL PENETRATION TESTING
An internal penetration test assesses the possibility and the extent to which access of sensitive or protected information and data may be gained by an unauthorized entity from within an organization's external perimeter and firewalls. A real-world example of this scenario would include a malicious actor gaining access or knowledge of an employee credentials through social engineering attacks such as email phishing, social media phishing or telephonic pretexting.
An internal penetration test assesses the potential impact a malicious actor would have if access to the internal physical network is obtained. Sometimes referred to as an “assumed breach”, this type of testing assumes the attacker has achieved some level of limited access, as is so often the case if an end user clicks on a phishing email. This scenario is also common if an organization allows public access to their physical environment, as the ability for an attacker to plant a drop box inside the environment, allowing internal access from outside the environment, is difficult to defend.
Operating under the assumption that an attacker will never make it into the environment is typically not a wise or realistic perspective. Internal penetration testing services provide the insight needed understand an environment’s weaknesses, defense and detection capabilities as well as the true, real-world risk facing an organization.
EXTERNAL PENETRATION TESTING
External Penetration Testing performs an examination and attack simulation from outside the network perimeter. During an External Penetration Test, Birch Cline assumes the role of a malicious actor who has targeted an organization and is attempting to gain unauthorized access to its sensitive data and critical systems.
Real world examples of a scenario where such an attack against an environment would occur include events involving an organization that attracts public scrutiny or the attention of activist groups willing to target network motivated by political or social agendas; nation state or other politically motivated actors targeting organizations or government entities with the intent of disrupting services your organization provides or intentionally impacting the public’s confidence in your organization; an individual or group motivated by a personal vendetta specific to your company or employees; or the external network environment simply becoming a target of opportunity for malicious actors who continually scan large blocks of Internet addresses at random looking simply for an opportunity to exploit any vulnerability identified.
Birch Cline external penetration testing closely emulates the tactics, techniques and procedures most often utilized by malicious actors to exploit external facing services, software and appliances. Our External Penetration Testing process is much more than vulnerability scanning, it combines real-world manual processes and methodologies with the same tools commonly used by state actors and adversarial groups so you can fully understand how your defenses will hold up against the most modern, current day attacks.
An External Penetration Test from Birch Cline helps you stay ahead of malicious actors and truly understand how susceptible your environment is to attack. External Penetration Testing services will give you confidence that your perimeter defenses and their configurations are secure and will identify vulnerabilities that exist and give you a path to remediation to help you minimize risk.
WIRELESS PENETRATION TESTING
When performing Wireless Penetration Testing Services, Birch Cline assumes the role of a malicious actor targeting your organization’s wireless network broadcast to assess the potential and level of effort necessary to successfully exploit the wireless authentication to gain unauthorized access to your network environment.
There are many variables involved in a professional wireless security and penetration testing assessment. During the testing process, Birch Cline assesses physical security of locations where your network broadcast reach is available from public access locations and vehicle access. Birch Cline provides the likely areas from which a malicious actor would choose to operate as well as recommendations and consideration from a physical deterrent perspective.
Additionally, Birch Cline performs testing in phases of sophistication by utilizing equipment beginning with common everyday wireless network access from a standard laptop, to highly sensitive, long range wireless antennas to capture authentication combined with custom hash cracking boxes which would be utilized by a high level, highly skilled attacker.
This combination of tools and techniques provides your organization with a real-world perspective of the potential and level of effort that is required to successfully attack and exploit your wireless network environment.
ADVANCED SOCIAL ENGINEERING & SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS (SNA)
Advanced external risk analysis and open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques are what sets Birch Cline apart from other top penetration testing companies.
For a high-level targeted attack to be successful a thorough understanding of the target must be obtained by the attacker. During the Reconnaissance phase of the penetration test, Birch Cline collects data using standard network probing and OSINT as well as an advanced assessment approach that includes target mapping via Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Sentiment Analysis (SA) of an organization’s social media presence as well as associated employee (current and former) social network data.
These advanced techniques and processes are commonly used by high-level nation state actors but are only offered in penetration testing services provided by Birch Cline. This resulting analysis provides a unique perspective of an organization's perceived points or risk and the targets a malicious actor will perceive to be most susceptible to attack (e.g. phishing attacks).
Keeping in mind that the goal of a top penetration testing service is to a view of the business from a malicious actor’s perspective. Birch Cline achieves delivers the best penetration test services by performing non‐aggressive use of public services and social networking websites to acquire organizational intelligence including employee names, email addresses and other associated information including the identification of acquisition of public and previously compromised data that may exist on the deep and/or dark web.
Utilizing this data to apply risk scoring in conjunction with social network graphing and sentiment analysis, Birch Cline provides an external risk analysis that goes far above and beyond other top penetration testing companies.
Additional Penetration Testing Resources
The following is additional valuable information and external resources related to Penetration Testing that is recommended for review.
MITRE ATT&CK® is a globally-accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations. The ATT&CK knowledge base is used as a foundation for the development of specific threat models and methodologies in the private sector, in government, and in the cybersecurity product and service community.
The Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) consists of seven main sections covering information from the initial communication and reasoning behind a penetration test, through the intelligence gathering and threat modeling phases where testers are working behind the scenes in order to get a better understanding of the tested organization, through vulnerability research, exploitation and post exploitation, where the technical security expertise of the testers come to play and combine with the business understanding of the engagement, and finally to the reporting, which captures the entire process, in a manner that makes sense to the customer and provides the most value to it.
The Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) technical guidelines help define certain procedures to follow during a penetration test.
The OWASP Top 10 is a standard awareness document for developers and web application security. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications.
NIST Special Publication 800-115 (SP- 800-115) provides guidelines for organizations on planning and conducting technical information security testing and assessments, analyzing findings, and developing mitigation strategies. It provides practical recommendations for designing, implementing, and maintaining technical information relating to security testing and assessment processes and procedures, which can be used for several purposes—such as finding vulnerabilities in a system or network and verifying compliance with a policy or other requirements.
