Automated Network Penetration Testing

A manual penetration test is run by a human ethical hacker who probes your systems creatively over a fixed engagement, usually once or twice a year. It's excellent for complex, bespoke and business-logic flaws, but it's time-consuming and costly. An automated penetration test uses a purpose-built platform to run the same core network attack techniques — discovery, exploitation, privilege escalation and lateral movement — consistently and far faster, so you can test every month instead of once a year. They're complementary: automated PTaaS gives you continuous coverage, and a periodic manual test adds deep human insight.

A vulnerability scan (or assessment) identifies and lists known weaknesses in your environment — but it stops there. It doesn't try to exploit anything, so it can't show real-world impact. Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) goes further: it safely exploits vulnerabilities and performs post-exploitation — credential attacks, privilege escalation, lateral movement — to demonstrate how an attacker could chain weaknesses together to reach sensitive systems and data. Put simply: a scan tells you what might be wrong; a penetration test proves what an attacker could actually do.

A traditional penetration test is a point-in-time snapshot performed once or twice a year, so your environment can drift out of a tested state for months. IT.ie's PTaaS lets you run a full network penetration test every month or on demand in a few clicks — so you understand your risk in near real-time and can prove that fixes actually worked.

The platform attempts SMB relay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, cautiously executed DNS and ARP poisoning, hash cracking, password dumping and retrieval, authentication attacks, privilege escalation and lateral movement — the same techniques used in a manual penetration test, only much faster.

Yes. The platform replicates a number of the attacks documented in the MITRE ATT&CK framework, although the current reporting structure does not yet include direct references to the framework.

Anything with an IP address counts — servers, workstations, phones, printers, IP cameras and other network devices. Only live, active systems count toward your limit: if you provide a /24 range but only five systems are active, your count is reduced by five, not by the whole range. We don't recommend excluding devices such as printers — any device on the network can present a risk.

IT.ie's automated PTaaS is focused strictly on network security. That includes host discovery and information gathering, authentication attacks against services such as SMB, Active Directory, FTP, POP3 and Telnet, man-in-the-middle attacks, and exploitation and post-exploitation such as shell access and enumerating Active Directory group memberships and shares.

An executive summary plus technical and vulnerability reports are generated within 48 hours of the test completing, so your team can quickly cross-reference the activity against your own monitoring and alerting controls and begin remediation.