Not Your Typical Penetration Testing Company

The penetration testing market is crowded. Dozens of firms will happily take your budget, run an automated scanner across your infrastructure, dress the output up in a branded report template, and hand it back to you in time for your compliance deadline. Job done. Box ticked. See you next year.

That is not what we do.

Silverback Cyber was built on a simple premise: that a penetration test should tell you something real about your security, not just satisfy an auditor. If you have ever received a pen test report and wondered what it actually means for your organisation, or felt like the findings could have come from any company on any network, you have experienced the checkbox problem firsthand.

What a Checkbox Pentest Actually Looks Like

Checkbox penetration testing follows a familiar pattern. A junior consultant or an automated tool scans your external perimeter or web application, the output gets triaged and formatted, and you receive a report full of CVE numbers, CVSS scores, and generic remediation advice lifted from vendor advisories. The findings are technically accurate. They are also almost entirely useless for understanding your actual risk.

CVSS scores do not tell you whether a vulnerability is exploitable in your specific environment. Generic remediation advice does not account for your architecture, your team’s capabilities, or your operational constraints. And a list of findings with no narrative thread does not help you understand how an attacker would actually move through your organisation.

Worse, checkbox testing actively creates a false sense of security. Passing a compliance-driven pen test does not mean you are secure. It means you passed a compliance-driven pen test.

What We Do Instead

Silverback Cyber is an independent consultancy. When you engage us, you work directly with Keiran, the founder, who brings over 15 years of hands-on offensive security experience to every engagement. There is no account manager in the middle, no junior consultant doing the actual work, and no automated scanner standing in for human expertise. The person you speak to is the person testing your environment and writing your report

We hold elite certifications including OSCE3 and GXPN, qualifications that require demonstrating practical exploitation ability under exam conditions, not just passing a multiple choice test. These are the credentials that separate people who understand offensive security conceptually from people who can actually execute it.

When we test your environment, we are not just looking for known CVEs. We are looking for the attack paths that exist in your specific configuration, the combinations of weaknesses that individually look minor but chain together into something critical, the business logic flaws that no scanner will ever find. We think like the adversaries that are actually targeting organisations like yours.

Reports That Actually Help You

A Silverback Cyber report is written for two audiences: the technical team remediating the findings and the leadership team making decisions about risk. Neither audience is an afterthought.

Technical findings include full reproduction steps, evidence, and remediation guidance written specifically for your environment and technology stack. Not a link to a vendor advisory. Not a copy-paste from a CVE database. Actual guidance that accounts for how your systems are built and how your team works.

Executive findings are written in plain language, with risk rated by real-world business impact rather than abstract CVSS scores. Leadership should be able to read the executive summary and understand exactly what is at risk, what the realistic consequences are, and what needs to happen next.

Every engagement also includes a remediation review at no additional cost. We retest your fixes and confirm they have been implemented correctly, because a finding that has been incorrectly remediated is still a finding.

We Stay With You

The relationship does not end when the report lands in your inbox. We are available throughout the remediation period to answer questions, clarify findings, and help your team understand the technical detail behind each issue. If something is not clear, you can ask the person who found it.

For organisations that want ongoing assurance rather than a single point-in-time test, our Continuous Penetration Testing service provides rolling assessments throughout the year, ensuring that new vulnerabilities introduced as your environment evolves are identified before an adversary finds them first.

The Question to Ask Any Pen Test Provider

Before you commission a penetration test, ask your provider a simple question: who will actually be doing the testing?

If the answer is vague, if they cannot name a specific consultant or confirm their experience level, or if the price is suspiciously low for the scope you need, you are likely looking at a checkbox engagement. You will get a report. You will not get security.

At Silverback Cyber, the answer is always specific. You know who is testing your environment, you know their background and credentials, and you know they are approaching your assessment with the same rigour and creativity that a real adversary would bring.

If that is what you are looking for in a penetration testing partner, we would like to hear from you.

Not Your Typical Penetration Testing Company