Challenge
A manufacturer with several sites, each on a different internet carrier, was about to replace its firewalls. Its technology director wanted to know what the company exposed to the internet today, before the change, and to have the answer in writing.
Nobody had looked at the whole picture from the outside. Each site had been set up at a different time, and some of the public addresses belonged to the carriers and not to the company.
Approach
We carried out an authorized external assessment of every public address range the company uses, without attempting to break anything.
- Confirm who owns each address range, so the company's systems are separated from its carriers' equipment.
- Find which addresses respond.
- Sweep every port on each responding system, then the common ones used by other kinds of traffic.
- Identify the software and version behind each service found.
- Review the encryption settings on anything that uses them.
- Scan for known vulnerabilities and check the results against the public catalog.
- Report the findings by severity, with a short list of what to change first.
Result
The assessment found a small, well-contained exposure and no known vulnerabilities, with a short list of hardening items.
- A written record of exactly what each site exposes.
- Carrier-owned equipment identified, so nobody chases problems that are not theirs.
- Hardening items folded into the firewall replacement already planned.
- A baseline to test against once the new firewalls are in.
Our advice
Test before a major change as well as after it. The first report tells you what the project has to fix, and the second proves that it did.
Related service: IT security & penetration testing.