Network Penetration Testing Manchester

CREST-accredited network and infrastructure penetration testing for Manchester 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 Manchester 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 Manchester

Manchester's digital, software and professional services concentration means most organisations here are cloud-first with small physical estates. That usually makes assessment quick, provided every cloud service is actually inside the identity provider, which is the single most common thing we find is not true.

When the internal network is really the identity provider

For a lot of the Manchester organisations we test, the phrase "internal network" is misleading. There is no server room. The office is a router, a switch, some access points and a lot of laptops that could be anywhere in the country on a given day. What used to be the internal network now lives in Entra ID and Microsoft 365, or in Google Workspace, and the thing an attacker is working towards is an account rather than a server.

That changes what an internal test spends its time on. The questions worth asking about a cloud-first estate are mostly configuration questions, and these produce findings most often.

• Conditional access policies that look complete until you check which accounts and applications are excluded from them.
• Legacy authentication methods still enabled somewhere, quietly bypassing the multi-factor requirement everyone assumes is universal.
• Highly privileged accounts used for day to day work, and break-glass accounts with weak or undocumented protection.
• Guest accounts left over from a project that finished, still able to see more of the tenant than anyone intends.
• Application registrations and consented permissions that nobody has reviewed since the app was added.
• Devices registered rather than properly joined and managed, so they appear in the console without being under control.

Hybrid setups deserve a particular mention. An organisation that started with an on-premises Windows domain and moved to Microsoft 365 later usually still has both, stitched together by directory synchronisation. That sync server is an attack path in its own right, because it can affect accounts on both sides, and it is commonly treated as an ordinary server nobody thinks about. Whoever controls it is close to controlling the tenant, so it gets attention on every test where it exists.

Remote access is the perimeter now

An external test covers everything answering on the public addresses you own: every open port, the service behind it, its patch level and configuration, and anything published that you did not mean to publish. For an organisation with racks of its own that is a long list. For a cloud-first one it is often short, perhaps a remote access gateway, a couple of marketing hosts and whatever is left from an earlier arrangement.

A short list is not a safe one. The perimeter is now the way your people get in from wherever they are working, and that is what gets attacked. What we commonly find on it:

• A remote access appliance running firmware with a publicly known and actively exploited flaw, because patching it means a maintenance window nobody wants to book.
• Remote desktop published directly to the internet, usually described as temporary when it was set up.
• A management interface reachable from anywhere because somebody needed it from home once.
• A staging environment nobody counts as production, holding a copy of real customer data.
• DNS records still pointing at cloud resources that were switched off, leaving a name someone else can quietly claim.

The SaaS that never got enrolled

The gap we see most often in fast-growing Manchester companies is the service that was never brought into the identity provider at all. A tool was bought by one team on a card to solve a problem that week, people signed up with individual addresses and their own passwords, it worked, and nobody revisited it. Repeat that across design tools, code hosting, deployment pipelines, support desks and analytics over a couple of years of growth and you have a real estate sitting outside every control you have paid for.

Two things follow. When somebody leaves, the leaver process covers the identity provider and misses everything never connected to it, so those accounts stay live. And multi-factor authentication is only as universal as your enrolment, so an account with a reused password is reachable by anyone holding that password from another breach. Accounts like that often hold tokens reaching back into the environment the identity provider is meant to protect.

What we need from you before testing starts

What we ask for before a network test, and why it matters

What we need	Why
Confirmed IP ranges, domains and tenant details	We test what you have confirmed as yours and nothing else. Addresses move between customers on shared hosting, so an old record is not good enough.
Authorisation from anyone hosting on your behalf	Where a platform, managed provider or landlord owns the infrastructure, they may need to authorise testing, and that waits on their response time rather than ours.
A named technical contact for the testing window	Someone who can confirm whether a host is yours and can be reached if something needs a quick decision.
A list of services holding company data	This is where the tools nobody enrolled tend to surface, and it is usually the most useful hour anyone spends before a test.
How we reach the internal side	Either a virtual machine you build for us on the internal network or a small device we post out, decided during scoping.

An external test on a small cloud estate is one of the easiest engagements to bring forward when an enterprise customer or an investor has set a deadline, which is a common reason a first test gets commissioned here. Our standard lead time from agreed scope to testing is two to three weeks, and a contained external scope can sometimes run sooner, as the page on testing at short notice explains. An internal test needs more warning, because access has to be arranged and third-party authorisation waits on somebody else. If you are still comparing suppliers, our notes on choosing a provider set out what to ask for.

Common questions

Penetration testing for Manchester organisations

Testing requirements in Manchester usually arrive through enterprise client security questionnaires, and investor or acquirer due diligence. Given the largest digital, software and professional services concentration outside London, alongside substantial manufacturing and logistics, 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. Manchester engagements usually run remotely, with an on-site day only where the estate needs it.

Where a Manchester 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.