Cybersecurity Professional Services

Security work that calls for a specialist

We are a boutique firm, so the people who scope your engagement are the people who run it — senior certified practitioners, not account managers. Every engagement is built around your environment and written up in language your leadership and your engineers can both act on. You get more than a report; you get a partnership.

Attackers are getting in through flaws you could find first

Exploiting a vulnerability is now the single most common way into an organization — 31% of breaches start that way, ahead of stolen credentials at 13%. Rapid7 counted 146 high- and critical-severity vulnerabilities exploited in the wild during 2025, up 105% year over year, and the median time for a new flaw to reach CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list fell from 8.5 days to 5. A penetration test tells you which of those actually apply to you, and vulnerability management keeps the list short between tests.Sources: Verizon 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report; Rapid7 2026 Global Threat Landscape Report.

Your people are still the most reliable way in — and the channel has moved

62% of breaches involve the human element, and social engineering accounts for 16% of breaches on its own. What has changed is where it happens. Mandiant now ranks voice phishing as the second most common initial infection vector at 11%, ahead of email phishing at 6%, and CrowdStrike recorded vishing intrusions doubling in the first half of 2026. Verizon also found mobile-focused phishing draws about 40% more engagement than traditional email simulations. Testing only the inbox no longer tests your people. Pair testing with ongoing phishing simulations and awareness training.Sources: Verizon 2026 DBIR; Mandiant M-Trends 2026; CrowdStrike 2026 Threat Hunting Report.

Prevention buys you minutes, not days

Average eCrime breakout time — from first foothold to moving laterally — is 29 minutes, 65% faster than 2024, with the fastest observed at 27 seconds. Meanwhile the global median dwell time rose to 14 days from 11, and roughly half of all intrusions are still reported to the victim by somebody outside the organization. That gap between how fast attackers move and how slowly they are noticed is what detection and response exists to close, and it is the core of our managed security program.Sources: CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report; Mandiant M-Trends 2026.

The inbox is still the front door

Microsoft detected 8.3 billion email-based phishing threats in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Credential phishing made up 94% of payload-based attacks in March, QR-code phishing rose 146% across the quarter, and roughly 10.7 million business email compromise attempts were recorded in the same three months. Cofense found that through 2025, a malicious email slipped past a secure email gateway and into somebody’s inbox every 19 seconds. Hardening email is not one setting — it is authentication, filtering, Microsoft 365 configuration, and people, together. Start with a free security assessment.Sources: Microsoft Security, Email Threat Landscape Q1 2026; Cofense Annual State of Email Security 2026.

31%

of breaches now start with an exploited vulnerability — the number one way in.Verizon 2026 DBIR

62%

of breaches involve the human element, whether error, misuse or manipulation.Verizon 2026 DBIR

29 min

average time from an attacker’s first foothold to lateral movement.CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report

19 sec

between malicious emails landing in an inbox past the gateway, on average through 2025.Cofense Annual State of Email Security 2026

What we deliver

Four services, scoped to what you actually need

Take one, take all four, or start with an assessment and let the findings decide. Every engagement has a defined scope, a fixed end, and a debrief you can act on.

Penetration Testing

Certified white-hat testers attack your systems the way a real adversary would — with your permission, inside agreed windows, and without disrupting the business. Findings are ranked by real-world risk, written in plain language with exact remediation steps, then retested once you have made the fix. More on penetration testing.

Internal network testing
External network testing
Web application testing
Mobile application testing
Red teaming
Automated and continuous testing
Social engineering

Social Engineering

Technology is not your only attack surface. We safely test how your team responds across every channel attackers now use — not just email — then help you close the gap with training rather than blame. Results feed straight into your awareness program.

Phishing (email)
Vishing (voice)
Smishing (SMS)
Pretexting scenarios
Targeted campaign design
Post-test coaching

Detection & Response

Anything that gets past prevention has to be caught fast. We help you stand up the monitoring, alerting and response capability to spot a threat early and contain it before it spreads — and we can run it for you as part of our managed security program.

Managed detection and response (MDR)
24/7 SOC monitoring
Incident response
Containment and recovery support
Post-incident review

Email Security

Most attacks still start in the inbox. We assess and harden your email defenses end to end — authentication records, filtering, Microsoft 365 configuration, and the people reading the mail — so fewer malicious messages arrive and the ones that do get reported instead of clicked.

Phishing defense
Email security hardening
Email deliverability and reliability
Microsoft 365 email management
Spam filtering
Web filtering
Security awareness training

How it works

From first call to closed finding

Scope

A short call to agree what matters, what is in bounds, and what “done” looks like. You get a fixed scope and a fixed timeline before anything is signed.

Rules of engagement

Testing windows, escalation contacts, and what we will and will not touch — all in writing and agreed by both sides before we start.

Test

Senior certified practitioners do the work. Anything critical is reported the day we find it, not saved for the final report.

Report and debrief

One report your leadership and your engineers can both use: ranked findings, the evidence behind them, and exact remediation steps. We walk you through it live.

Retest

Once you have made the fixes, we verify them. A finding is not closed because it was written down — it is closed because it no longer works.

Before you book

Questions we get asked

How is this different from your MSSP program?

Professional services are scoped engagements with a start and an end — a test, an assessment, a response. The MSSP program is ongoing, monthly protection that runs your defenses day to day. Plenty of clients use both: the engagement finds the gaps, the program keeps them closed.

Is a vulnerability scan the same as a penetration test?

No, and buying one when you need the other is a common and expensive mistake. A scan tells you which known weaknesses are present. A penetration test proves which of those can actually be chained together into real access, and what an attacker would reach once inside. Most organizations need continuous scanning plus periodic testing, not one or the other.

Do we need a penetration test for compliance?

Often, yes. PCI DSS v4.x requires internal and external penetration testing at least annually and after any significant change, and requires exploitable findings to be remediated and retested. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 programs, and a growing number of cyber insurance applications, ask for evidence of recent testing as well. We will tell you honestly what your framework actually requires before you buy more than you need — see PCI compliance and compliance & risk management.

Will testing disrupt our business?

It should not, and preventing that is most of what the rules-of-engagement step is for. Testing windows, systems in and out of scope, and escalation contacts are all agreed in writing first. Anything genuinely disruptive — denial-of-service testing, for example — only happens with explicit written permission, and normally does not happen at all.

Who actually does the work?

Senior certified practitioners. We are a boutique firm on purpose: the person who scopes your engagement is the person who runs it, and the person who wrote the report is the person who walks you through it. There is no layer of account management between you and the people doing the testing.

Something is happening right now — can you help?

Yes. Incident response is part of our detection & response practice. Call 1-833-4-HAXORS and describe what you are seeing. If you are not sure whether what you are looking at is an incident, call anyway — that call is free, and the wrong time to work out who to phone is during a breach.