Penetration Testing in Athens, GA

Penetration Testing for Athens and Metro Atlanta Businesses

COMNEXIA has operated as a security-first managed IT services provider out of Roswell, Georgia since 1991. Over 35 years, we have watched Athens-area businesses, from Clarke County medical practices to auto dealerships on Atlanta Highway, deploy firewalls and endpoint tools and still get breached because nobody ever confirmed those controls actually work under attack conditions. Penetration testing is that confirmation. It is a structured, authorized simulation of real attacker techniques against your actual network, applications, and user accounts, not a checkbox scan, not a vulnerability report that stops at "medium risk." The output is evidence: these specific paths exist, an attacker would use them in this sequence, and here is what you must fix.

Why Athens and Metro Atlanta Businesses Need a Pen Test Now

Georgia businesses face the same threat actors targeting every mid-market company in the Southeast. What makes the Athens corridor specific is the mix of industries: University of Georgia-adjacent healthcare and research vendors subject to HIPAA, retail and hospitality businesses that process card payments under PCI DSS, and auto dealerships operating CDK Global, Reynolds and Reynolds, or Dealertrack DMS platforms that now carry direct FTC Safeguards Rule (16 CFR 314.4) obligations. The FTC Safeguards Rule, effective June 2023, requires covered auto dealers to conduct periodic risk assessments and test the safeguards implemented to control those risks. A penetration test is the most defensible way to satisfy that testing requirement. A vulnerability scan is not.

What COMNEXIA Tests and How

Our penetration tests follow a defined methodology aligned to PTES (Penetration Testing Execution Standard) phases: reconnaissance, threat modeling, exploitation, post-exploitation, and reporting. We scope each engagement to your environment before we begin. Typical scope elements for an Athens-area client include:

• External network perimeter: public-facing IPs, firewall rule validation, exposed RDP or SMB ports, and VPN gateway weaknesses
• Internal network lateral movement: can an attacker who lands on one endpoint pivot to your domain controller, your DMS server, or your backup infrastructure
• Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) conditional access and MFA configuration: we test whether conditional access policies enforce MFA on every sign-in path or whether legacy authentication protocols bypass them entirely
• Endpoint detection response gap analysis: we run simulated attacker techniques and verify whether SentinelOne EDR or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint catches and blocks them, or whether gaps exist in policy configuration
• Phishing and credential harvesting simulation: targeted spear-phish campaigns against staff to measure click rates and credential submission, paired with your existing security-awareness training baseline
• Dealership DMS-specific testing: for CDK Global or Reynolds and Reynolds environments, we validate network segmentation between the DMS segment and the general office network, since FTC Safeguards Rule Section 314.4(f) requires access controls that limit employee access to customer financial data

The Deliverable: A Report You Can Act On

Every COMNEXIA penetration test produces a written report with two sections. The executive summary states in plain language which systems were compromised during the test, what data was accessible, and the business risk in terms of compliance exposure, not just a CVSS score. The technical findings section lists each vulnerability with the exact tool or technique used to exploit it, the affected hostname or IP, remediation steps with named configurations (for example, disabling NTLM relay in your Active Directory environment, or enforcing Entra ID sign-in risk policies for high-risk users), and a severity rating. We do not hand you a 200-page automated scanner output and call it a pen test report.

After the Test: Closing the Gaps

Finding vulnerabilities is only useful if they get fixed. COMNEXIA's managed services team uses NinjaOne RMM to push patches and configuration changes to endpoints across your environment once the remediation plan is agreed upon. If the test reveals EDR policy gaps, we reconfigure your SentinelOne or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint policies and document the change in your monthly security report. If MFA is missing on legacy authentication paths, we work through your Microsoft Entra ID tenant to enforce those conditional access policies. For dealerships with 3-2-1 backup requirements under the Safeguards Rule, we verify that immutable off-site backups are confirmed intact after any remediation activity that touches backup infrastructure. Clients on COMNEXIA's managed services plan receive ongoing 24/7 SOC monitoring so that the vulnerabilities we close do not simply re-open after the next software update cycle.

Schedule Your Athens-Area Penetration Test

If your Clarke County business, dealership group, or Atlanta metro operation has not had an independent penetration test in the past 12 months, the controls you think are protecting you have not been verified. COMNEXIA scopes, executes, and remediates penetration tests for businesses across Athens, Roswell, Alpharetta, and the broader metro Atlanta corridor. Call us at (877) 600-6550 to speak with a security engineer about scoping an engagement for your specific environment. We will tell you exactly what we will test, what we will not, and what the final report will contain before you commit to anything.