Adversary-grade penetration testing for healthcare

What a healthcare penetration test is, and why hospitals need one

A penetration test is an authorized, simulated attack on your environment. We don't run a scanner and email you the output. We chain real weaknesses together the way an actual intruder would, exploiting a misconfiguration, pivoting across the network, escalating privileges, and proving exactly how far an attacker could get and what they could reach: ePHI, the EHR, domain admin, the medical-device network.

Healthcare is a uniquely hard target to defend. Hospitals run flat networks, legacy operating systems that can't be patched, and thousands of connected devices that were never designed with security in mind. A vulnerability scan tells you a door is unlocked. A penetration test walks through it, tells you what's on the other side, and shows you which doors actually matter.

The stakes are not abstract. Per IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, healthcare has the highest average breach cost of any industry at roughly $9.77M, a position it has held for more than a decade. The goal of testing is simple: find and fix the paths an attacker would use before they cost you patients, dollars, and trust.

What we test

We scope every engagement to your environment and your risk. Most hospital and clinic tests cover several of the following, and we'll recommend a mix during scoping:

• External network, internet-facing infrastructure: VPNs, remote access, patient and provider portals, email security, and exposed services an attacker hits from the outside.
• Internal network, what a malicious insider, a compromised laptop, or an attacker who got past the perimeter can reach. This is where flat networks and weak segmentation usually surface.
• Web and cloud applications, patient portals, scheduling and billing apps, custom clinical tools, APIs, and Microsoft 365 / Azure / AWS configurations, tested against the OWASP Top 10 and beyond.
• Clinical systems and the EHR, authentication, access controls, role-based permissions, and HL7 / DICOM interfaces, validating whether ePHI is properly protected and whether least-privilege actually holds.
• IoMT and medical devices, infusion pumps, imaging (PACS and modalities), patient monitors, and other connected devices: assessing exposure, segmentation, default credentials, and known critical vulnerabilities, always with patient safety first.
• Wireless, corporate, guest, clinical, and biomedical SSIDs; rogue access points; and whether a parking-lot attacker can reach the networks that matter.
• Social engineering and phishing, targeted phishing, pretext calls, and (where in scope) physical access, because the fastest way into most healthcare networks is still a person, not a port.

Our methodology

We follow a structured, repeatable process aligned to recognized standards, the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES), the OWASP Testing Guide for web and API work, MITRE ATT&CK for adversary techniques, and NIST SP 800-115 as the technical baseline for security testing. We only name standards that genuinely apply to your scope.

Every test moves through the same phases: reconnaissance and mapping, vulnerability identification, controlled exploitation, post-exploitation (privilege escalation, lateral movement, and proving impact such as access to ePHI or the EHR), and clear reporting with reproducible evidence.

We don't stop at the first vulnerability. The value is in the chain, showing how a low-severity foothold becomes domain compromise, because that's the story your board and your auditors need to understand, and the story a real attacker would write.

How we test safely in live clinical environments

Testing a hospital is not testing a tech startup. A crashed server can mean a delayed diagnosis, and an aggressive scan against an infusion pump or patient monitor is a patient-safety event, not just an IT problem. We treat it that way.

Before anything runs, we agree on rules of engagement in writing: scope, timing, escalation contacts, and explicit go / no-go criteria. We coordinate windows with your IT and clinical engineering teams, and high-risk targets, especially live medical devices, are handled with passive and read-only techniques, lab or test-bench methods, or careful, supervised approaches rather than blunt-force exploitation.

• Defined rules of engagement, named points of contact, and a real-time stop procedure that pauses testing the moment patient care could be affected.
• Medical devices and IoMT are assessed with safety-first techniques, passive observation, configuration and segmentation review, and controlled testing, never reckless exploitation of devices attached to patients.
• Active testing scheduled around clinical operations, with continuous communication so your team always knows what we're doing and when.
• An emergency rollback and de-confliction plan so that if something looks like an outage, we can immediately confirm whether it's us and back off.

What you get, deliverables

A penetration test is only as useful as what you can do with it. Our reporting is built to drive action at every level of the organization, from the board to the engineer who applies the fix.

• Executive / board-ready summary, plain-language risk narrative, business impact, and overall posture, written so a non-technical leader, auditor, or insurer can understand it.
• Technical findings with severity, each issue rated (typically CVSS-aligned), with evidence, reproduction steps, affected systems, and the realistic attack path we proved.
• Prioritized remediation roadmap, what to fix first, sequenced by real-world risk and exploitability, not just raw scanner scores, with concrete guidance your team can act on.
• A debrief with your team to walk through findings and answer questions, and a retest after you remediate, so you can verify the fixes worked and demonstrate closure to leadership, auditors, and cyber-insurers.

How it works

1. 01

   Scope and rules of engagement

   We define targets, objectives, timing, and explicit go / no-go criteria with your IT and clinical engineering teams, and put authorization and escalation contacts in writing before any testing begins.

2. 02

   Reconnaissance and mapping

   We map your attack surface the way an adversary would, external footprint, internal network, applications, wireless, devices, and people, to find the paths most likely to matter.

3. 03

   Exploitation

   We safely exploit the weaknesses we find to confirm they're real and not theoretical, using safety-first techniques on clinical systems and medical devices and coordinating closely around live patient care.

4. 04

   Post-exploitation

   We escalate privileges and move laterally to prove true business impact, what an attacker could actually reach, including ePHI, the EHR, and the medical-device network, then chain findings into the full attack story.

5. 05

   Reporting, debrief, and retest

   You receive a board-ready report, severity-rated technical findings, and a prioritized remediation roadmap, plus a live debrief and a retest to verify your fixes held.

Frameworks & standards we align to

Every finding maps back to the standards your auditors, board, and cyber-insurer already speak.

Frequently asked questions