Penetration Testing Adelaide
Core Sentinel delivers senior-led penetration testing to Adelaide and South Australian organisations — remotely for most engagements, on-site when the work genuinely needs it. Every test is performed by a senior tester holding OSCE and OSCP, backed by 20+ years of hands-on experience and 30+ professional certifications. We exploit manually — never automated scan-and-send — quote a fixed price from your scope before testing starts, and include a free retest once you’ve remediated. Call 1300 859 443 or request a fixed-price quote.
- OSCE / OSCP-certified testers
- Senior-only — no junior bench
- Free re-test & letter of attestation
Penetration testing services for Adelaide organisations
From a single web application to a full assumed-breach assessment of your network, Adelaide businesses get the complete range of our penetration testing services:
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Web application penetration testing
Senior-led, OWASP-based testing of your applications and the APIs behind them, including the access-control and business-logic flaws no scanner can reason about.
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External infrastructure penetration testing
Your internet-facing perimeter attacked the way a real adversary would: OSINT, enumeration and safe manual exploitation of every exposed service.
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Internal penetration testing
Assumed-breach and Active Directory testing that shows how far an intruder, contractor or malicious insider could actually get inside your Adelaide network.
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Mobile application penetration testing
iOS and Android apps and their backend APIs, tested at the code, platform and traffic level.
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Wireless penetration testing
Performed on-site at your Adelaide premises: corporate and guest Wi-Fi, rogue access points, and the segmentation between wireless and corporate networks.
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Cyber security professional services
Red teaming, social engineering, source-code review and security advisory from the same senior specialists who deliver our penetration tests.
Every engagement ends the same way: a prioritised, evidence-backed report your engineers can act on, a free retest to prove your fixes hold, and a letter of attestation you can hand to clients, primes and auditors. Adelaide is one part of a national practice — see penetration testing across Australia for the full picture.
Sydney-based, delivered in Adelaide — how that actually works
Let’s be upfront about something most “penetration testing Adelaide” pages won’t say: Core Sentinel is based in Sydney, at Governor Phillip Tower, 1 Farrer Place. We don’t have an Adelaide office, and we’re not going to invent one to win a search ranking. Here’s why that doesn’t matter for most engagements — and what we do when it does.
Most penetration testing is remote by nature. The attackers probing your perimeter aren’t sitting in a Grenfell Street office either — they’re coming over the internet, and so do we. Web application, external infrastructure and mobile engagements run entirely remotely, under written rules of engagement with agreed testing windows and escalation contacts. Your tester is a senior OSCE/OSCP-certified specialist, and you deal with that person directly throughout — not an account manager relaying messages to a junior bench.
Two engagement types need something more, and both are routine engagements for us:
- Wireless testing is always on-site. Radio doesn’t travel over a VPN, so we come to your premises — anywhere in Greater Adelaide, from the CBD to Mawson Lakes, Tonsley or Osborne — with the visit scheduled at scoping and included in your fixed price.
- Internal testing is your choice. We ship a pre-configured VPN implant device to your office, or work from a jump host you provide — the standard approach for our clients Australia-wide — or we test on-site inside your network if your security policy requires it.
Either way, the testing itself is identical: manual, senior-led exploitation with evidence behind every finding, a debrief where your team can question the person who actually broke in, and a fixed price agreed before anything starts.
Defence, space and South Australia’s security landscape
Adelaide carries a concentration of national-security work few Australian cities can match: naval shipbuilding at Osborne, the Defence Science and Technology Group and RAAF base at Edinburgh, and the Australian Space Agency headquartered at Lot Fourteen on North Terrace. That gravity shapes the local market — and the security obligations that come with it.
If you supply into the defence sector, security requirements flow down the chain to you. Primes and Defence increasingly expect suppliers to demonstrate real control maturity — Essential Eight alignment, ISM-aware architecture, and independent technical testing to prove the controls work in practice, not just on paper. A senior-led penetration test with findings mapped to the specific controls they affect is exactly that evidence.
The same applies beyond defence. South Australian government suppliers face security questionnaires and framework obligations before contracts are signed. Adelaide’s technology sector is growing — from Lot Fourteen startups to established SaaS companies — and technology companies come to us when a SOC 2 audit or an enterprise customer’s vendor assessment demands an independent penetration test, usually with a deadline attached. Because scoping is fast and pricing is fixed, you can put a firm number and a firm date in front of whoever is asking.
Compliance-driven testing: Essential Eight, ISM/IRAP and more
Most Adelaide organisations that call us have a framework behind the request. We scope the engagement to the one you answer to and map every finding to the control it affects:
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Essential Eight
The baseline for the defence supply chain and government suppliers. We test whether your implemented mitigations actually stop the techniques they’re meant to stop, at the maturity level you claim.
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ISM and IRAP
For systems built to the Information Security Manual or operating in IRAP-assessed environments, we scope testing against the ISM controls your assessor cares about and report in language they recognise.
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ISO 27001 and SOC 2
Auditors expect regular independent technical testing; our report and letter of attestation slot straight into your evidence pack.
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PCI DSS
Requirement 11.4 mandates penetration testing at least annually, and after significant change, for in-scope entities.
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APRA CPS 234, the SOCI Act and ST4S
Regulated financial entities must test that their security controls are effective; critical-infrastructure operators and education providers carry their own obligations. We scope against all of them.
For a framework-by-framework breakdown of what each standard actually requires, see our guide to penetration testing for Australian compliance.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a penetration test cost in Adelaide?
Every engagement is fixed-price, quoted up front from your scope — the number of applications, IP ranges, user roles and the depth of testing required. Any on-site component for Adelaide is priced into the same quote, so there are no travel surprises later, and the free remediation retest is always included. Send us your scope and we’ll return a firm number before anything starts.
Do you have an office in Adelaide?
No — and we’d rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. Core Sentinel is based in Sydney at Governor Phillip Tower, 1 Farrer Place. Most engagements for Adelaide clients run entirely remotely, which is how real attacks arrive anyway, and we travel to Adelaide for on-site work such as wireless testing whenever an engagement calls for it.
Can you do on-site penetration testing in Adelaide?
Yes. Wireless testing is always performed on-site at your Adelaide premises. Internal testing can also run on-site, or remotely via a pre-configured VPN implant device we ship to your office or a jump host you provide — whichever your security policy and budget prefer. On-site visits are scheduled at scoping and included in the fixed price.
Are you CREST certified?
Our founder has completed CREST certification. Every engagement is delivered under current OSCE and OSCP certifications — the hands-on offensive-security qualifications — backed by 20+ years and 30+ professional certifications. Every test is senior-led and manual: the certification belongs to the person actually attacking your systems, not to a company badge.
Is DAST the same as penetration testing?
No. DAST is automated dynamic scanning — worth running in a CI pipeline, but it only recognises what its signatures already know, and it can’t chain small weaknesses into an attack path or reason about your business logic. A penetration test is a skilled human manually exploiting your systems the way an adversary would. Many clients run DAST continuously and use an annual penetration test to find what it misses.
Can you test against the Essential Eight or IRAP requirements for defence suppliers?
Yes. For defence supply-chain and government-facing engagements we scope testing against the Essential Eight mitigations and the relevant ISM controls, then map every finding to the specific control it affects — giving you evidence of control effectiveness you can put in front of a prime, an assessor or an auditor.
Book a penetration test in Adelaide
Let us hack you before they do. Tell us what needs testing and a senior OSCE/OSCP-certified tester will come back with a fixed-price quote — typically for a few days to two weeks of active testing, with a free retest included.
Prefer to talk it through first? Call 1300 859 443.