Pentest

An Active Directory Audit is a white-box security assessment of your on-premises Active Directory that identifies misconfigurations, dangerous permissions, and attack paths leading to domain takeover, before an attacker or ransomware can exploit them.

The ransomware attacks with the biggest impact run through Active Directory: whoever takes over the domain controls every system and every file in the company. A single forgotten permission or an old misconfiguration is often all it takes. These are exactly the vulnerabilities this audit uncovers, before an attacker finds them.

An Internal IT Infrastructure Penetration Test simulates an attacker who already has a foothold inside your network (for example after a phishing click) and tests whether they can move laterally and reach Domain Admin.

Someone on your team clicks the wrong email attachment, and an attacker is inside your network. What happens next depends on what they find there: does the attack stop at one machine, or do they move laterally and take over every system you run? This test answers that question before a real attacker does.

“What does a pentest cost?” is the question I get asked the most, and the honest answer is always “it depends.” That’s not a dodge. A pentest is billed by effort, not sold as a fixed product, so the real question underneath it is what decides how much effort a given project actually needs. This post explains exactly that.

During an internal infrastructure penetration test or a web application penetration test, I regularly need to send clients things they really don’t want lying around in an inbox: the final report, extracted credentials, a dump used as proof for a finding. Email and generic file sharing tools are a bad fit for that. So I built VidraCrypt (opens in a new tab), a small open-source tool that decrypts files entirely in the browser, with the server never seeing the passphrase or the plaintext.

Choosing a penetration testing provider is hard when you are not a security specialist yourself, which is the situation most SMBs are in. The market is full of confident sales pitches, and the difference between a genuinely useful test and an expensive compliance checkbox is not obvious from a brochure. This checklist gives you the specific questions to ask and what good answers sound like.

NIS2 has pulled thousands of mid-sized companies into a compliance regime they never had to think about before. If you run IT at a 50 to 500 person company in the DACH region, you have probably been told you need to “do something about NIS2,” and that a penetration test is part of it. This article explains, plainly, what a NIS2-ready pentest actually looks like and what auditors expect to see.

You need a penetration test, and the market offers three very different shapes of provider: the boutique single operator, the large security firm, and the PTaaS platform. They are priced differently, they deliver differently, and they are not interchangeable. This guide compares them on the factors that actually change the outcome.

You’ve decided you need a penetration test. Good call. But before you sign a proposal, there’s a lot that can go wrong: wrong scope, wrong methodology, wrong expectations. The result is a report that collects dust and a budget that got wasted.

This guide is written for the people buying pentests, not the people running them. It covers what a pentest actually is, when to do one, what to expect, and how to avoid the most common and expensive mistakes.

A Cloud Infrastructure Audit is a read-only, white-box review of your Azure, AWS, or GCP environment that finds misconfigurations, over-privileged IAM roles, and exposed services before attackers do.

Cloud services offer enormous flexibility, but that flexibility comes with risk. Misconfigured storage buckets, overly permissive IAM roles, and exposed management interfaces are among the most common causes of cloud security incidents. A Cloud Infrastructure Audit reviews your cloud environment with a read-only account to identify exactly these issues before attackers do.

Supported platforms: Azure, AWS, and GCP. For Azure environments, cloud IAM misconfigurations are frequently intertwined with Entra ID role assignments and Conditional Access; both are often reviewed together.

An Entra ID Audit (formerly Azure AD) is a white-box review of your Microsoft Entra ID tenant that uncovers identity and access misconfigurations, weak Conditional Access policies, and privilege escalation paths.

EntraID (Microsoft Entra ID) is Microsoft’s central identity and access management (IAM) solution, especially in Microsoft 365 environments, and forms the basis for single sign-on (SSO) and access control. A misconfiguration can lead to unauthorized access to company resources or facilitate social engineering attacks. Therefore, this component must be thoroughly tested.

An External IT Infrastructure Penetration Test assesses your internet-facing systems (servers, VPNs, mail, remote access) for exploitable vulnerabilities and exposure that an attacker could use to gain a foothold.

If your system is exposed to the internet, it could potentially be hacked by anyone. Okay, I exaggerate a bit, but I think you understand. Vulnerabilities in your external infrastructure can lead to very bad press and threaten your customers’ personal information. Regular external infrastructure penetration testing keeps that attack surface in check.

A Web Application Penetration Test is a manual security assessment of a web application and its APIs, focused on the OWASP Top 10: broken access control, injection, authentication flaws, and business logic vulnerabilities.

Your web application is reachable from the internet around the clock, for your customers and for attackers alike. A single access control flaw is often enough to expose other users’ data or take over the server. Those are exactly the flaws I find, before someone exploits them.