Which assessment concentrates on identifying exploitable weaknesses that are accessible from the internet to compromise an organization's perimeter?

• A. External Assessment
• B. Internal Assessment
• C. Network-based Assessment
• D. Wireless Network Assessment

Answer: (A)

Assessing from outside the network targets the outward-facing surface an attacker would reach from the internet. Its goal is to uncover exploitable weaknesses that are accessible over the internet and could be used to breach the organization’s perimeter. This includes public-facing servers, exposed services, weak authentication on internet portals, misconfigured firewalls, or exposed management interfaces—anything that an attacker could reach without internal access. That focus on the external attack surface explains why this type of assessment best fits identifying weaknesses that lie on the boundary and could compromise the perimeter.

Internal assessments look from inside the network, checking what an attacker could do after breaching the perimeter. Network-based assessments examine network infrastructure and traffic, often within or across internal networks. Wireless network assessments concentrate on wireless infrastructure and security, not the broader internet-facing perimeter.