Network Penetration Testing Birmingham

CREST-accredited network and infrastructure penetration testing for Birmingham businesses, from the internet-facing perimeter to the internal network.

Testing your network inside and out

An external test looks at what an attacker can reach from the internet. An internal test looks at what someone who already has a foothold, a compromised device or a rogue insider, can then get to. Most Birmingham businesses benefit from both.

What a network test looks at

We assess your external perimeter, internal segmentation, servers and accounts, Active Directory and Entra configuration, patching, and the misconfigurations and legacy devices that let an attacker move laterally once inside.

Reporting you can act on

You get a prioritised, plain-English report focused on what actually reduces risk, with fixes your IT team or provider can realistically deliver.

Network penetration testing in Birmingham

Birmingham's economy is split between professional and financial services in the city centre and a manufacturing and metals base across the wider conurbation. Those two halves need very different things from a security engagement: one is dominated by client data and sector regulation, the other by shop-floor equipment that predates the requirement being asked of it.

Flat networks, and what lateral movement actually means

A lot of the network testing we do across the Birmingham conurbation is for businesses that make or finish something physical, and the same pattern keeps coming up. The office network and the production side of the building grew up together, on the same addressing, behind the same firewall, often plugged into the same switches. Nobody designed it that way. A machine needed a network point one year and the nearest spare port was in the office rack.

That is what people mean by a flat network. Lateral movement is the plain-terms consequence. An attacker who gets onto one machine, usually through a password given away in a phishing email, is not stuck on it. They look for the next thing they can reach and the next credential they can reuse, and they repeat that until they land on something that matters. On a flat network, very little stands between the first machine and the last.

So an internal test here is not a list of missing patches. It answers one question: starting from an ordinary user's position, how far can somebody get, and what would make that distance longer? The answers sit in Active Directory more often than anywhere else. Service accounts with passwords that never expire and administrative rights granted once for an installation years ago. A local administrator password identical on every desktop, so one cracked hash opens all of them. Group memberships left behind by someone who changed role three years ago.

Testing equipment that cannot take a hard scan

The second thing that shapes an engagement here is the equipment. Sites in manufacturing, metals and engineering commonly run a mix of ages on one network: current laptops alongside a controller, an inspection rig or a machine console that has been in service fifteen years and has another fifteen in it.

Some of that will not tolerate an ordinary scan. A fast port sweep, or a few dozen simultaneous connections, is sometimes enough to make an older embedded device stop responding. That is not a security incident, but a stopped line is still a stopped line, and it is why some firms have quietly avoided internal testing altogether. We solve it by agreeing the treatment of each range before anything starts.

• Addresses you flag as fragile are tested slowly, with reduced concurrency, and usually outside production hours.
• Some devices are assessed by configuration review and by observing the traffic they already produce, rather than by probing them at all.
• Anything with a realistic chance of disruption is put to you first and only run with your contact on the phone.
• Denial of service testing is excluded unless you specifically ask for it.

A named technical contact who can answer during the testing window matters more on this kind of site than any other. Somebody who can confirm that an address is yours rather than the machine supplier's, or that a cell can come out of service for ten minutes. Without that, testing either stalls or takes chances it should not.

The legacy point deserves saying plainly, because it is where these sites feel stuck. An unsupported operating system driving a press or a measuring machine often cannot be upgraded, because the software that runs the machine does not exist for anything newer. That is a genuine constraint and the report treats it as one. The recommendation is rarely to replace the machine. It is to put it where it can do no harm: its own segment, only the connections it actually needs, no route to the internet, and no shared credentials with the office domain.

Three ways of getting onto your internal network

An external test needs nothing from you but confirmed addresses. An internal test needs us to be inside, and there are three practical ways to arrange that.

Ways to run an internal network test, and what each one costs in time

Approach	How it works	Time it costs you
Site visit	The tester attends and connects in person, which also allows wireless testing and a look at physical network access.	Travel from Shropshire plus the testing days, and a date that suits both sides, so it takes the most arranging.
Device sent to you	We post a small preconfigured device. Someone plugs it into a network point and gives it power, and testing runs remotely through it.	A day or so of post each way, and ten minutes of somebody's time at your end.
Jump host you provide	You build a virtual machine on the internal network and give us access to it.	Quickest where you already run virtualisation. An hour or two of your IT team's time.

Where office and production share a network, the posted device is often the sensible answer, because the port that gives a true picture is on the shop floor rather than in the server cupboard. A visit earns its keep where there are several segments to reach, or where you want wireless and physical access covered too. Travel is quoted before you commit, and the guide to what a test costs explains how scope drives the rest.

All of this is why an internal test needs more notice than an external one. Our standard lead time from agreed scope to testing is two to three weeks, and an external test is the one we can most often pull forward when something is needed at short notice.

Common questions

Penetration testing for Birmingham organisations

Testing requirements in Birmingham usually arrive through a client or framework requirement, for the professional firms, and a flow-down clause from a larger customer for the manufacturers. Given a city centre dominated by professional, legal and financial services sitting on top of a metals, castings and component manufacturing base spread across the wider conurbation, the scope is most often a web application, an external infrastructure range, or both together where a customer has asked for evidence covering everything they can see.

The day count is driven mostly by how many user roles an application has and how much genuinely distinct functionality sits behind them, not by page count. We scope on a call rather than through a form, and the quote is fixed for the scope agreed. Birmingham is forty minutes from our office, so on-site work here is routine rather than a special arrangement.

Where a Birmingham requirement names CREST, check the provider holds accreditation at company level rather than relying on an individual certification: ours is verifiable on the CREST marketplace. See what a penetration test costs for ranges by test type.