It’s not enough to have a security program with its associated policies, procedures, security controls, and periodic audits. This might show your organization is secure “on paper,” but what about during real life day-to-day operations, when it really counts?

TalaTek offers penetration testing and social engineering services, where we mimic hackers to test the security of your systems and your organization. We coordinate these services with key stakeholders and limit our exercises to what you agree on ahead of time. This ensures your organization’s normal business operations are not disrupted.

Penetration testing

During penetration testing, our certified ethical hackers attempt to access—penetrate—your organization’s IT environment via a simulated attack, looking for vulnerabilities and weaknesses. We examine operating systems, services, and applications; look for bugs, flaws, or improper configurations; and check for signs of risky employee behavior—anything that an external entity, such as a hacker or other malicious actor, could exploit to gain entry.

Our penetrating testing services include:

• Network discovery: Scanning your network as a hacker to identify available hosts. We then validate the network topology/architecture with key stakeholders.
• Vulnerability assessment: Scanning the host network using our vulnerability scanners to determine any weaknesses in your current defenses.
• Exploitation: Performing more aggressive scans of the information system to try to access systems and data.

 Conducted regularly, penetration testing can test the effectiveness of the preventive and detection security measures you use to protect your assets and data.

 Social engineering

During a social engineering campaign, our cybersecurity analysts work with your organization to plan a suitable phishing—fake—email to send to your staff that’s similar to those used by hackers to fool people into providing credentials or downloading attachments. Hackers only need one set of credentials to attack your system, and attachments can include malware and ransomware.

Here’s how it works:

• Your organization determines which employees will receive the phishing email.
• We coordinate with you to develop the content.
• We send the email to the selected targets.
• We collect data on open rates, click rates, download rates, and other statistics that show how your employees engaged with the email.

 The phishing campaign tests your employees’ level of security awareness and can help you plan effective security training. It can also result in information our analysts can use in the penetration testing’s exploitation phase.

Final deliverables: Remediation plans to mitigate vulnerabilities or weaknesses

If the penetration test or social engineering campaign identify weaknesses in your environments, we document those vulnerabilities and outline which defenses are effective and which can be defeated or exploited. We then offer remediation steps your organization can take to minimize or eliminate them. These recommendations can help guide your security investments and target your resources to where you need them most.

To rigorously test your security program and discover where you may be most vulnerable, or to learn more about our penetration testing and social engineering services, contact us at info@talatek.com.