3 Tips for a More Effective Pentest Automation Strategy

How prepared are you to handle the next cybersecurity breach? It’s a question every organization needs to ask, especially as cyber threats become more sophisticated by the day. The stakes are higher than ever. Developing an effective pentest automation strategy is now essential, as researchers from Cybersecurity Ventures predict that cybercrime will cost the global economy over $1 trillion per month by 2030, with those costs growing by 2.5% per year for the next half decade.

That’s a staggering amount, and it’s a sign of just how critical it is to stay ahead of the curve. So, what can you do to protect your systems effectively? A big part of the answer lies in automation – specifically, in refining your pentest automation strategy. 

The inclination toward automated penetration testing is a response to a fundamental problem: manual pentesting cannot possibly keep pace with the speed and scale of modern development cycles. Automated penetration testing enables continuous security validation across your entire infrastructure. This method also frees your skilled testers to focus on complex scenarios that genuinely require human expertise and creativity. 

Building an effective automated pentesting strategy requires thoughtful planning, clear priorities, and a realistic understanding of what automation can and cannot do for your security program.

Here are three essential tips for building an effective pentest automation strategy that improves security and enhances collaboration across your organization.

Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration and Access

Broad and intentional access to pentest tools and findings is essential for organizations to take a holistic approach to prioritizing remediation. Cybersecurity, IT operations, development, and compliance teams should be involved to ensure that the most urgent vulnerabilities are identified and addressed across all levels.

For example, the security team handles vulnerabilities and exploitable risks, and IT operations address infrastructure and configuration issues. At the same time, developers resolve application-level flaws, and compliance ensures requirements are met.

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Benefits

• Faster vulnerability resolution: When all relevant teams are involved, vulnerabilities can be addressed quickly, reducing the time between discovery and remediation.
  
• Reduced knowledge silos: Shared access to pentest results ensures that no team is working in isolation, improving the efficiency of your security efforts.
  
• Stronger alignment between security findings and remediation actions: Collaboration ensures that the right experts are addressing the issues relevant to their areas, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities slipping through the cracks.
  
• Improved communication across teams: Regular touchpoints help improve overall communication between teams, making sure everyone understands the priorities and progress of pentesting efforts.
  
• Increased accountability: With clear ownership across departments, it’s easier to track progress and ensure teams follow through on their responsibilities.

Action Steps

• Set up shared dashboards and role-based access: Implement tools that allow teams to access relevant pentest findings based on their responsibilities, fostering better communication and collaboration.
  
• Schedule regular cross-team reviews of findings and progress: Hold periodic meetings to review vulnerabilities and track progress, ensuring timely remediation and cross-team alignment.
  
• Create clear escalation processes: Make sure teams know how to escalate issues when necessary, ensuring quick resolution of critical vulnerabilities.
  
• Encourage knowledge-sharing: Facilitate sessions for teams to share expertise and lessons learned from pentesting to improve overall cybersecurity efforts.
  
• Maintain visibility for all stakeholders: Make sure leadership and department heads can track progress, ensuring organizational alignment with security goals.

Throttle Testing and Minimize Operational Disruption

Automated pentesting can place a significant load on systems, especially if scans are performed at the wrong time. Careful planning is needed to ensure that testing doesn’t interfere with operations or customer experiences.

Benefits

• Maintains service availability and business continuity: Scheduling tests carefully ensures that services aren’t disrupted, minimizing any negative impact on operations or customer experience.
  
• Prevents negative user experience: effective pentest automation strategies that impact application performance can frustrate users; careful scheduling prevents this from happening.
  
• Reduces operational downtime: By testing during off-peak hours or in staging environments, you can avoid slowdowns or outages during critical times.
  
• Increases confidence in security processes: When systems are tested without interrupting normal operations, it builds confidence in your security measures among both staff and customers.
  
• Optimizes resource use: Ensuring tests are properly timed means resources are used efficiently, without overwhelming systems during peak usage times.

Action Steps

• Assess network and application sensitivity before testing: Understand which systems are most critical and plan tests accordingly, ensuring minimal impact on business operations.
  
• Build automated scheduling that adjusts dynamically: Set up automated tests that adapt to your business calendar, adjusting test schedules based on traffic patterns or key events.
  
• Set alert thresholds to pause or slow scans: Program automated tests to slow down or pause if they’re starting to affect system performance, ensuring no significant disruption.
  
• Test in staging environments before production: Use non-production environments for tests to avoid any impact on live systems. Once validated, tests can be moved to production.
  
• Monitor system health during testing: Implement continuous monitoring during automated tests to catch any performance dips or issues before they escalate.

Blend Automated Results with Manual Review and Validation

While an effective pentest automation strategy can speed up the process of finding vulnerabilities, it’s still critical to have human experts review the results. Automated tools can sometimes generate false positives or miss complex vulnerabilities that require contextual understanding. Manual review by security experts ensures confirmation of critical vulnerabilities. 

Benefits

• Higher confidence in findings and prioritized remediation: Manual validation ensures that automated results are accurate, allowing for effective prioritization of remediation efforts.
  
• More comprehensive coverage: Combining automated and manual testing ensures that both common and complex vulnerabilities are caught and addressed.
  
• Improved risk assessment: Manual review allows teams to assess vulnerabilities in real-world contexts, ensuring the right threats are addressed first.
  
• Better handling of complex systems: Automated tools may miss vulnerabilities related to dynamic or high-value systems that require human judgment to detect.
  
• Enhanced security posture: The combination of effective pentest automation strategy and human expertise leads to a more thorough and reliable security strategy, reducing the chances of undetected vulnerabilities.

Action Steps

• Incorporate periodic manual testing cycles: Set up regular manual review sessions, whether quarterly or after major changes, to validate automated results and add human context.
  
• Develop workflows for triage: Establish a clear triage process where automated findings are reviewed by human experts to verify their accuracy and urgency before being escalated.
  
• Train staff in interpreting and augmenting automated test results: Make sure your security team understands how to validate and enhance the findings from automated tools, ensuring greater accuracy.
  
• Implement feedback loops: Use insights from manual reviews to refine automated tests, improving accuracy and effectiveness in future scans.
  
• Prioritize based on exploitability: Work with your team to prioritize vulnerabilities not just by severity but also based on the likelihood of exploitation in real-world scenarios, ensuring that remediation efforts are focused on the most pressing risks.

Conclusion

An effective pentest automation strategy should be an integral part of your security policy. By involving the right teams, reducing testing disruptions, and ensuring manual validation, you can improve both the speed and accuracy of your security efforts. This approach helps identify vulnerabilities more quickly and ensures that risks are addressed before they become serious threats, ultimately strengthening your overall cybersecurity defense.