Improving the Value of Compliance Pentesting with Retesting

Compliance is the primary reason organizations pentest today. Here, most organizations request a pentest, use the report to show third-party assessment of cybersecurity, and then done. The organization requesting the pentest largely never resolves issues except where necessary to pass compliance and mostly never looks at the report again after the audit is complete.

At the same time, organizations face ever higher risks of cyberattack. A breach can compromise your business, its reputation, and your customers. 40–50% of small businesses eventually experience breaches, and 60% of those breaches result in 8+ hours of downtime and cost $10,000+. Compliance pentesting, with the goal of managing and resolving vulnerabilities, helps you to add more value to the full process — reducing risks while ensuring compliance is reached. And, with retesting and vulnerability tracking as delivered through Cyver’s pentest-as-a-service platform, it’s easy to request retests for resolved vulnerabilities before the audit.

In this article, we’ll cover how and why pentest-as-a-service delivers a better experience to companies pentesting for compliance.

What Pentest-as-a-Service Means for Your Audit Process

Pentest-as-a-Service, as delivered by firms like Cyver, offer a lot for compliance purposes. Here, we deliver tools to immediately access and resolve findings, to view real-time findings mapped to compliance controls, and see “Real-time status” for findings.

Retesting and real-time reporting in the dashboard can streamline the audit process. Rather than having to prove that you’ve resolved issues, you simply share a “clean” vulnerability status with real time data. This offers numerous advantages to the organization. For example, the original report still functions to guide IT budget and security decisions. At the same time, information is delivered in real time to the people who can actually resolve issues. Reducing time-to-fix not only helps with compliance, it offers massive gains to total security as well. Faster pentests cost less to run, less to resolve, and result in fewer risks across your organization. And, with the ability to show resolved vulnerabilities to an auditor, you simplify compliance audits.

Compliance with Traditional Pentesting

Everyone knows how the traditional pentesting process works. Normally companies request a pentest anywhere from 1–5 weeks in advance, schedule a pentest, and the ethical hackers get to work. Eventually, you receive a report, complete with a full overview of all findings of vulnerability. You break this down and hand it off to developers and/or IT-staff, who get to work resolving issues.

When the auditor shows up, you go over the pentest report with them. In most cases, you spend time explaining how, when, and why you resolved the finding. That’s time-consuming at best and greatly adds to the complexity of the audit process.

Compliance with Pentest-as-a-Service

Pentest-as-a-Service allows us to deliver real-time results, in the cloud, directly to developers. We also leverage automated reporting, meaning you can update finding status at any time.

• You or developers/IT security request the pentest
• Ethical hackers get to work
• Findings are uploaded as tickets to the cloud
• Developers see findings in real time and can immediately work on resolving them
• Following a resolution, the developer/IT security can request a retest
• We automatically perform the retest. If it’s successfully resolved, we mark it as such
• You show the auditor findings resolution in the dashboard

Integrated Threat Risk Management — Pentest Hero delivers a threat risk dashboard with every pentest. You can log in at any time to see total threats (resolved and ongoing). These include a complete threat risk analysis and rating, categorization, and data. This allows you to better manage risks over time, to see ongoing threats, and to prioritize budgets, even over numerous pentesting and compliance cycles.

Getting Started

If you’re up for an audit, Cyver can help. Depending on timelines, we can deliver a full pentest in as little as a few weeks. And, with a full cloud-based process, you skip insecure email, lengthy delegation of findings, and reading long reports. Instead, we manage the full pentest process, from kickoff to final retest through our digital platform. You onboard your developers and security specialists, and we’ll alert them as results are found. They can immediately get to work, without waiting on management to review or breakdown vulnerabilities from a high-level report .

Visit our How it Works page to learn more. Or, request a pentest now to get started right away.

Originally published at https://cyver.io on March 2, 2021.