Penetration Testing Australia
Core Sentinel delivers penetration testing across Australia the way it should be done: every engagement is performed end-to-end by a senior, OSCE/OSCP-certified tester — never handed to a junior bench, and never an automated scan dressed up as a report. You get a fixed-price quote from your scope before you commit, manual exploitation that proves real business impact, a prioritised fix list your engineers can act on, a free remediation retest and a letter of attestation you can hand to customers and auditors. Request a fixed-price quote →
- OSCE / OSCP-certified testers
- Senior-only — no junior bench
- Free re-test & letter of attestation
Organisations come to us for three reasons. A customer's vendor assessment is asking for your latest penetration test report. An auditor or regulator needs evidence — ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, APRA CPS 234. Or you simply want the honest answer to an uncomfortable question: how far would a real attacker get inside your environment? Our tagline is not a slogan, it is the engagement model — let us hack you before they do.
We are a Sydney-based penetration testing company serving all of Australia, from SMEs facing their first vendor security questionnaire to regulated enterprises with recurring annual testing obligations. The testing team carries 20+ years of offensive-security experience and 30+ professional certifications, including OSCE and OSCP — the hands-on certifications earned by actually breaking into hardened systems, not by sitting a multiple-choice exam.
The timing usually falls into a familiar pattern: before a major launch, when a new application or platform is about to face the internet; on an annual cycle, driven by a compliance framework or a customer contract; after significant change, when infrastructure has been migrated or a codebase substantially reworked; and after an incident, when the board wants independent assurance that the hole is closed and nothing similar is waiting nearby. Whatever prompted it, the engagement looks the same from your side — a defined scope, a fixed price, a senior tester, and evidence you can act on.
Penetration testing services we deliver Australia-wide
Six core engagement types cover the attack surface most Australian organisations actually have. Every one is scoped individually, quoted at a fixed price, and delivered by a senior tester. You can browse the full penetration testing services australia catalogue, or go straight to the engagement you need below.
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Web application penetration testing
Manual, OWASP-aligned testing of your web applications and the APIs behind them — injection, broken access control, authentication and session weaknesses, and the business-logic flaws no scanner can reason about. Findings are chained to demonstrate real impact, not listed as theoretical severities. See web application penetration testing.
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Mobile application penetration testing
iOS and Android testing across the full stack: the client itself, data in transit, and the server-side APIs the app talks to, with coverage structured around the OWASP Mobile guidance. If your app handles credentials, payments or personal information, this is where attackers will look first. See mobile application penetration testing.
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External infrastructure penetration testing
An attacker's-eye assessment of everything you expose to the internet — IP ranges, firewalls, VPN endpoints, mail and remote-access services. We enumerate what is really reachable, then manually attack it the way an external adversary would, rather than pasting scanner output into a template. See external infrastructure penetration testing.
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Internal penetration testing
What happens after a phishing click, a rogue insider or a compromised laptop? Starting from a foothold on your internal network, we attempt to escalate to domain administrator and show you exactly how we got there — and which single fixes break the chain. Delivered via a VPN implant device shipped to your office, a jump host you provide, or on-site. See internal penetration testing.
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Wireless penetration testing
Misconfigured wireless lets an attacker onto your network from the car park, without ever setting foot inside. We test your corporate and guest wireless on-site — rogue access points, weak authentication, network segregation failures — and show you how to close the gaps. See wireless penetration testing.
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Professional services
Beyond testing: incident response, forensic imaging, secure code review, architecture review, risk assessment and WAF guidance, delivered by the same senior team. Useful when a pen test surfaces deeper questions, or when you need offensive-security expertise applied to a design before it ships. See professional services.
Our methodology: manual exploitation, never scan-and-send
A large share of what is sold as penetration testing in the Australian market is a vulnerability scan with a logo on it. The tool runs, the export is reformatted, and the "report" arrives full of unverified findings and false positives. That is not a penetration test, and it is not what a determined attacker does to you. Our methodology is built around a senior human doing what attackers do — carefully, under agreed rules, on your side.
Every engagement moves through the same disciplined phases:
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01
Scoping
We work with you to define exactly what is in scope — applications, IP ranges, user roles, environments — and what a successful test needs to answer. The scope drives a fixed-price quote, so the commercial question is settled before any testing begins.
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02
Rules of engagement
Targets, testing windows, credentials, escalation contacts and constraints are agreed in writing. Production systems can be tested safely when the rules are explicit; higher-risk techniques are coordinated with you in advance, never sprung on you.
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03
Manual testing and exploitation
The core of the engagement. A senior tester maps the attack surface, then manually probes and exploits weaknesses — chaining small flaws into meaningful compromise, validating every finding by hand, and gathering the evidence that proves impact. Tools assist; they never substitute for judgement.
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Reporting with a prioritised fix list
You receive a report with a plain-language executive summary for leadership, and detailed technical findings for engineers: each issue risk-rated by real business impact, with step-by-step reproduction, evidence, and specific remediation guidance — ordered so you fix what matters first.
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Free retest and letter of attestation
After you remediate, we retest every finding at no extra cost and confirm each fix actually holds. You then receive a letter of attestation summarising the engagement — the document customers, partners and auditors ask for.
Because every finding is manually verified before it enters the report, you spend your remediation budget on real exposure — not on triaging scanner noise. And because the tester holds the full picture of your environment, the fix list is ordered the way a defender should read it: the handful of changes that break entire attack chains come first, ahead of the long tail of hardening items.
Safety is part of the discipline. Testing production systems is routine when the rules of engagement are explicit — destructive actions are avoided by default, higher-risk techniques are coordinated with your team in advance, and anything critical discovered mid-engagement is escalated to you immediately rather than held back for the report. You are never left wondering what is happening on your own network.
Compliance-driven penetration testing in Australia
Most Australian penetration tests are commissioned because a framework, regulator or customer contract demands one. We structure engagements so the output slots directly into the assurance work you already have to do, and we map findings to the frameworks you report against:
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Essential Eight
Penetration testing validates whether your Essential Eight mitigations — application control, patching, privileged-access restrictions — actually hold up against hands-on attack, not just against a self-assessed maturity level.
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ISO 27001
Independent testing is the standard evidence auditors expect for technical-control and secure-development requirements in your ISMS, and our reports are written to be certifier-ready.
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SOC 2
A penetration test from an independent party is the evidence auditors routinely expect against the Security trust-services criteria; the attestation letter supports your report package.
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APRA CPS 234
CPS 234 requires regulated entities to systematically test the effectiveness of their information-security controls. Penetration testing is a direct, defensible way to demonstrate that testing has real teeth.
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PCI DSS
Requirement 11.4 mandates penetration testing at least annually — and after significant change — for in-scope entities. We test cardholder-data environments and segmentation controls to that requirement.
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IRAP
For organisations working toward or maintaining an IRAP-assessed environment, penetration testing provides the technical assurance layer that complements the assessment itself.
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SOCI Act
Critical-infrastructure entities under the SOCI Act carry positive security obligations; adversarial testing gives boards evidence that cyber-risk controls perform under attack, not just on paper.
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ST4S
EdTech providers going through Safer Technologies 4 Schools benefit from independent testing evidence that their platforms protect student data in practice.
For a deeper walkthrough of which frameworks require testing, how often, and what evidence each expects, see our guide to penetration testing for Australian compliance.
Where we work: pen testing across Australia
Core Sentinel is based in the Sydney CBD — Governor Phillip Tower, 1 Farrer Place, Sydney NSW 2000 — and delivers penetration testing Australia-wide on a remote-first model. That is not a compromise; it mirrors how the work is actually done. Web applications, external infrastructure, mobile applications and APIs are tested remotely by nature — exactly as an attacker would approach them. Internal network testing is delivered through a VPN implant device we ship to your office, a jump host you provide, or on-site where the engagement calls for it. Wireless testing is performed on-site, because that is the only honest way to do it.
We work with organisations in Sydney and Adelaide, as well as Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and everywhere in between — same senior testers, same fixed-price model, wherever you are. We won't pretend to have a tower in every capital; what you get instead is the same senior specialist on every engagement, anywhere in the country. In practice, remote-first also means your engagement is never constrained by who happens to be in a local office — the tester best suited to your scope does the work, regardless of your postcode.
Why a senior-only penetration testing company
The common industry model is bait-and-switch by org chart: a principal consultant scopes the work and wins the deal, then the testing lands with whoever is free on the bench — often a junior running a standard toolkit against a checklist. The report looks professional. The testing behind it went an inch deep.
We run the opposite model. There is no junior bench to hand your engagement to. The person who scopes your test is the senior, OSCE/OSCP-certified specialist who performs it, backed by 20+ years in offensive security and 30+ professional certifications. That matters in practice, not just on a capability statement:
- Depth of findings. Business-logic abuse, chained privilege escalation and multi-step attack paths are found by experienced humans reasoning about your system — they do not appear in scanner output at any price.
- Signal, not noise. Every finding is manually validated and rated by real impact in your context, so your team is not burning sprints on false positives.
- Direct access. Your engineers talk to the tester who found the issue — during the engagement, at the debrief, and through remediation. No account layer in between.
- Honest fixed pricing. Because a senior can scope accurately, we quote a fixed price from the scope and hold it. No hourly meters, no mid-engagement variations.
If you are comparing providers for a pen testing engagement in Australia, one question cuts through every glossy capability deck: who, exactly, will be hands-on-keyboard during our test, and what have they personally broken into? We are glad to answer it before you sign — because with us, the answer is the person you have been talking to.
How an engagement runs
From first contact to attestation letter, the process is deliberately simple:
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01
Tell us your scope
A short conversation or scoping form: what needs testing, why, and by when. If the driver is an auditor, a customer or a framework, we factor that into how the engagement is shaped.
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Fixed-price quote
You receive a clear, fixed quote derived from the scope — before you commit. What we quote is what you pay.
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03
Rules of engagement and scheduling
We lock in targets, testing windows, access and escalation contacts in writing, and schedule the engagement around your change freezes and business calendar.
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Testing and reporting
A senior tester performs the engagement — typically a few days to two weeks of active testing, depending on scope — then delivers the full report and walks your team through the findings and the fix order.
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Free retest and attestation
Once you have remediated, we verify every fix at no additional cost and issue your letter of attestation.
Frequently asked questions
How much does penetration testing cost in Australia?
Every engagement is quoted as a fixed price derived from the scope — the number of applications, IP ranges, user roles and environments, and the depth of testing required. You get the full price up front, before you commit, and it does not move mid-engagement. Send us your scope and we will return a clear, fixed quote with no surprises and no hourly overruns.
How long does a penetration test take?
Typically a few days to two weeks of active testing, depending on scope — a single web application sits at the shorter end, while a combined external, internal and application engagement runs longer. Reporting follows active testing, and the free remediation retest is scheduled whenever your team has finished fixing.
How often should we do penetration testing?
At least annually, and after any significant change to your applications or infrastructure. Some obligations are explicit: PCI DSS Requirement 11.4 mandates penetration testing at least annually for in-scope entities, and APRA CPS 234 requires regulated entities to test the effectiveness of their information-security controls systematically. Even without a mandate, an annual test plus change-driven testing is the practical baseline most auditors and customers expect.
What is the difference between a penetration test and a vulnerability scan?
A vulnerability scan is an automated tool listing potential issues, many of which are false positives. A penetration test is a skilled human manually exploiting weaknesses and chaining them together to prove what an attacker could actually achieve in your environment. We never scan-and-send: every finding in a Core Sentinel report has been manually verified and evidenced by a senior tester.
Are you CREST certified?
Our testers hold OSCE and OSCP — the hands-on offensive-security certifications earned by breaking into hardened lab environments — backed by 20+ years of experience and 30+ professional certifications. Every test is senior-led and manual. If a specific accreditation is a hard requirement in your procurement process, tell us and we will discuss it openly.
Can you test our systems remotely, or do you need to be on-site?
Most testing is delivered remotely, Australia-wide — web, mobile, API and external infrastructure engagements are remote by nature, matching how an attacker would approach them. Internal network testing runs through a VPN implant device shipped to your office, a jump host you provide, or on-site. Wireless testing is always performed on-site.
What do we receive at the end of an engagement?
A full report containing a plain-language executive summary, risk-rated findings ordered by real business impact, step-by-step reproduction evidence for each issue, and specific remediation guidance written for engineers. After you remediate, we retest every finding free of charge, then issue a letter of attestation you can share with customers, partners and auditors.
Is penetration testing required for ISO 27001 or SOC 2?
Neither framework names penetration testing as a literal line item, but in practice auditors for both expect independent testing evidence — ISO 27001 for the technical-control and secure-development requirements of your ISMS, and SOC 2 against the Security trust-services criteria. By contrast, PCI DSS Requirement 11.4 does explicitly require annual penetration testing for in-scope entities. Our reports and attestation letters are written to serve as that evidence.
Ready to see what an attacker would find?
Send us your scope and get a fixed-price quote from a senior tester — not a sales rep.
Prefer to talk it through first? Call 1300 859 443 — you will be speaking with someone who actually does the testing.