Pentesting has always been central to any strong business resilience plan. That much has never been in question – nor will it be, particularly as the threat landscape evolves beyond recognition thanks to AI lowering the skills threshold for potential attackers.
But pentest reporting has been holding itself back for many years now. As a process, it’s a laborious and time-consuming one. To some degree, this is a necessity, since automating the entire process would likely mean downplaying the human element and overlooking vital insights in the fight for oversimplification. But, as with so many things these days, automating the right aspects of the job means creating more time for experts to spend on the parts of the task that actually require time, attention to detail, and expertise.
The Problem With Traditional Penetration Testing Reports
Historically, pentesting culminated in a static PDF report. This quickly became the industry standard, back when threats were simpler and slower-moving, and the environment lent itself to a more button-and-braces approach to penetration testing. Even a report delivered weeks after testing would still be highly valid and insightful, likely reflecting an environment that hadn’t changed at all between the end of the test and the final handover of the report.
Another element of these reports? They were typically written for technical readers. Stakeholders with no specialised understanding of cybersecurity would not find them to be particularly compelling reading material, even though they were written about the business they had a significant stake in.
And, since the reports were static, findings would remain stuck within them rather than being tracked through to remediation.
So, why is that suddenly falling short these days?
Point in time testing doesn’t work for a modern cybersecurity landscape. Things are evolving day by day, driven by breakthroughs in AI that can enable someone with a relatively limited understanding of edge security to carry out pretty sophisticated attacks.
Audit trails can be spread across different platforms and tools, exacerbated by disconnected reports across multiple engagements that just don’t speak to one another. This means that, with more tools and more insights than ever at our disposal, we’re feeling more fragmented than ever.
What’s the Solution?
In a nutshell, better reporting.
A report needs to frame the risks in a way that stakeholders and executives can understand, but they also need to offer the technical detail that security teams need in order to remediate the vulnerabilities.
It also needs to demonstrate progress rather than representing nothing more than an individual report snapshot from a single moment in time.
It needs to offer evidence of security programme maturity, and it needs to marry together the findings of many disparate tools and teams so that we have one cohesive picture that conveys the threat level, and provides a clear roadmap forward.
That’s a lot for one busy team to execute alongside the pentesting itself, which is why the company Cyver Core has developed a future-looking platform that is designed to automate the long and slow process of report writing. These reports are designed to cater to the very different needs of stakeholders and IT teams, and to bring together a huge smattering of insights and findings to paint the clearest picture possible rather than simply acting as a formal amalgamation of findings from a single point in time.
