External Infrastructure

What Is It?

Your external infrastructure is your border between your organisation and the rest of the world. This can be what you expose to the Internet, such as websites, email services, employee access solutions to name but a few, but also what you expose to suppliers or even what services you expose at your physical location to untrusted parties.

Why Assess It?

There are many reasons to conduct an external infrastructure security assessment, five of which are below.

Understand Exposure

By enumerating what is exposed and cross referencing with what you believe is exposed, you can be assured you know of the services any threat actor could target. An external infrastructure security assessment also reveals how these services hold up to a threat actor, allowing you to focus on priority remediation activities to remove critical steps from any threat actors attack chain.

Secure Reputation

What is exposed externally is essentially an advertisement for your organisation, good or bad. By understanding what is exposed and how secure it is you can ensure that you adhere to industry best practices and give confidence to others regarding your security posture, building that all essential trust.

Validate Supplier Assertions

A number of services are bought in from third party suppliers and it is always good to verify their statements about being secure, after all they are hosting services under your organisations reputation.

Protect Customer Data

In the increasingly tech savvy world, customers and users of an organisation are cyber security aware and expect their information to be handled securely. By assessing the security of these customer / user facing services you can ensure that your organisation is taking care of their information.

Conform to Compliance

Regular assessment also assists with compliance, such as Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards as well as reducing the likelihood of fines being imposed in the event of a security incident. The UK’s Information Commissioners Office (ICO) can issue fines up to £17.5m or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.

The Agility Cyber Approach

Like all our engagements, we want you to get the most out of your external infrastructure security assessment and we do this by:

Open Source Intelligence

To identify all your exposed assets and understand more about how a threat actor would refine their attacks against your organisation specifically we conduct open source intelligence gathering activities.

Threat Actor Simulation

We do not just run a network vulnerability scanner and report, we use prior knowledge and a deep understanding of security concepts to creatively find ways of subverting security controls in your environment against objectives that a real world threat actor would have.

Prioritised and Pragmatic Advice

We report what we find but we do not add issues to make the numbers up. We believe in identifying the patterns that affect your infrastructure and helping you to fix their root cause, ensuring you get a higher return on investment from the assessment and any remediation effort deployed by your teams.

Pull On Loose Strings

The purpose of emulating a threat actor is to ensure that the full extent of what is possible is understood. We do not just report a high level finding such as a patch is missing with an arbitrary severity rating. We take the time to probe further and, with your agreement, exploit it so that we can give an accurate severity rating and potentially uncover further vulnerabilities from any additional privilege or access achieved.

Never Assume

We pride ourselves on being factual and realistic, we check for all hosts in your allocated range rather than just a list of known live IP addresses, we check all ports and not just the common ones, we review services exposed fully rather than just reporting a port is open and we are always checking for signs of existing compromise, to give some examples of our comprehensive approach.

Benefits of Partnering with Agility Cyber

Mutually Invested

Our experts work with you, not against you. There are no egotistical celebrations when a serious issue is discovered, just rapid full disclosure with pragmatic suggestions for effective remediation followed by ongoing support.

Clarity and Simplicity

We always provide clarity, believe in simplicity and value your time. An example is rather than waiting until the engagement starts, we will conduct open source intelligence gathering activities before the scoping meeting to help us understand your organisations position and risk posture thus enabling us to ask better questions, securing you higher value and saving you time.

Full Consultancy

Our team, based in the UK, is technically exceptional but we pair that with business sense to discover, triage and help you remediate the full range of security issues.

Impartiality

We are impartial, we do not sell you products or the latest buzzword laden trending solution.

Outstanding Service

We have an industry leading turnaround, agility is in our name after all. Proposals are shared with you within 24 hours of the scoping meeting. Accurate and complete daily debriefs are given during every engagement. The report is shared within 5 working days at the latest.

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