The CISO’s Guide to Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS)

Executive Summary

Today’s ever-changing world of digital transformation has led to extraordinary opportunities for businesses—and for cyber criminals. The temptation to rush revenue-generating applications out the door is hard to deny – especially in today’s economy.

CISOs are still competing for budget and resources for security testing, while dealing with legacy pentesting challenges. Meanwhile, insecure applications are still being pushed into production without rigorous testing for vulnerabilities.

This is a big problem and huge opportunity at the same time for today’s CISO. With a cutting-edge new method now available to conduct third party penetration testing in half the time at half the cost, CISOs can evolve their pentesting programs for maximum ROI and move away from legacy providers that are expensive, unscalable, and inefficient.

As a new path forward, PTaaS enables DevSecOps teams to take action to stop preventable security breaches before it’s too late. This proactive approach to security testing stops downstream impacts – such as alert fatigue or a reportable breach – from impacting the Security Operations Center and the organization’s bottom line.

The Pentesting Imperative

Changes in consumer and employee behavior have introduced new opportunities for businesses—and for cyber criminals.

Over the past three years, the demand for digital goods and services has skyrocketed. At the same time, more people are working remotely than ever before. In this world of digital transformation, security is the lynchpin to success.

When security is deprioritized, organizations may find themselves in the breach headlines and scrambling to find budget as they face the business-crushing costs associated with a reportable security breach.

The most notable breaches in the past five years could have been prevented with proactive penetration and vulnerability testing.

Twitter, Uber, and LastPass all suffered breaches that were caused by high-risk, known vulnerabilities that could have been remediated had they been discovered with proactive pentesting before being pushed into production.

Inadequate Testing across Internal and External Systems

For most organizations, neither internal nor external systems are secure.

Applications, including mobile, API, and web-facing apps, require continuous security validation and vulnerability management. Even inexperienced cyber criminals have easy access to commercially available tools and open-source intelligence – from automation, dark web data, ransomware-as-aservice, and initial access brokers – to conduct cyber-crime and make a profit. The most critical risks facing today’s security and DevOps teams are known vulnerabilities exposed to the internet and inside the organization’s infrastructure.

This can be a problem if an organization is breached by a phishing attack, and the cybercriminal accesses internal systems with socially engineered credentials.

Penetration testing today must be conducted across the ‘full stack’ environments to comprehensively scan, discover, and identify all the potential vulnerabilities, attack paths, and vectors to and from external and internal systems.

Against this backdrop, penetration testing has become paramount to a successful security strategy. To minimize risks, smart technology leaders are integrating penetration testing into developer workflows within the continuous integration/development (CI/CD) pipeline, and evolving application testing environments, cloud security, and vulnerability management. When these areas are overlooked, they risk exposing data and users in production environments.

The Problem with Legacy Pen Testing

Attack surfaces are expanding rapidly. Threats are exponentially increasing faster than legacy pentesting can keep up. Legacy penetration testing solutions have lagged behind opportunities to improve old security testing methods with new technology, like artificial intelligence and automation.

Traditional Penetration Testing

Traditional pen testing vendors are constantly working through a massive list of clients. It can take weeks or months for them to complete one penetration test. This is a missed opportunity to manage security risks, as the faster an organization finds a vulnerability, the faster they can fix it.

With traditional penetration testing, it takes an average of 46 days to fix and find critical vulnerabilities, such as Authentication Bypass and Hard-Coded Credentials, and an average of 80 days for high-risk findings.

Automated Penetration Testing

While automated tools are an efficient way of getting an overall view of the organization’s security posture, they can be noisy, unreliable, and difficult to maintain for three reasons:

1. 1. Scans can’t detect insecure code for unknown vulnerabilities.

Automated tools may be able to discover known weaknesses at predetermined intervals, but are inadequate for security testing into the CI/CD pipeline or ongoing vulnerability monitoring and retesting.

• Scanning is passive and does not offer visibility or remediation guidance

A security team that relies on automation must deal with thousands of unprioritized alerts, many of which are false positives. Worse, automated scanners may be delayed in detecting an emerging threat with a proof of concept (PoC) in the wild.

• Reports provide little context and alerts may contain false positives.

DevOps teams don’t have time to parse a complicated report that doesn’t specify which vulnerabilities pose the greatest threats to the business; they need a
prioritized report that contains only the information they need to do their jobs. The more time they spend investigating results and removing false positives, the less time they have to resolve a vulnerability before a hacker exploits it.

The DevSecOps Disconnect

Fortunately, there’s a pentesting alternative that enables DevOps and reduces false positives—without increasing risk, introducing threats, or adding more work or downstream issues for the SOC.

Introducing: Penetration Testing as a Service

Organizations can get more from their penetration testing budget and build security maturity at the same time by shifting to a Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) model, which provides a new way forward for CISOs to build a cyber resilient security infrastructure without introducing unnecessary risks.

PTaaS is the new way to conduct penetration tests, validate security and compliance, and manage vulnerabilities into one solution.

Led by Certified Pentesting Experts

Like the consulting model, PTaaS features human-led engagements where simulated attacks are conducted on an
organization’s systems to test security measures and identify weaknesses. However, that is where the similarities end.

PTaaS picks up where legacy providers stop and elevates penetration testing to provide an end-to-end continuous security testing solution that enables the DevSecOps approach and maximizes security outcomes.

Next Generation Security Controls

PTaaS leverages the consultant-based model and combines it with the advantages of next generation automated vulnerability scanning and controls, and a SaaS-based customer portal.

Security leaders can manage penetration testing directly using the customer portal for on-demand third party penetration testing.

PTaaS: Key Benefits

Penetration Testing as a Service offers substantial benefits over legacy penetration testing solutions for
companies to secure their assets at scale.

• Saves Costs: Reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with embedded security capabilities that can be removed and/or reduced elsewhere.
• Saves Time: Accelerates security outcomes with integrated remediation guidance to meet pentesting requirements faster.
• Accuracy: Provides accurate results with certified penetration testers using the same
  industry methodology, standards, tools, and best practices.
• Compliance: Validates compliance requirements for third-party penetration testing and vulnerability scanning with certified reports and artifacts.
• Visibility: Reveals the adversary’s perspective to see attack surface exposures, critical
  vulnerabilities, and attack paths.
• Flexible: Scales as needed to conduct expert-led pentesting and end the penetration testing
  backlog without hiring additional resources.
• Agile: Enables Agility for DevSecOps teams with API workflow integrations to initiate ticketing triage of newly discovered vulnerabilities.
• Continuous: Supports continuous security monitoring, scanning, and retesting throughout the remainder of the PTaaS subscription.

Using these benefits, CISOs can advance their security posture, build cyber resilience, and defend their organization’s perimeter and attack surfaces from advanced persistent threats and evolving risks that threaten their organization’s bottom line.

BreachLock PTaaS at a Glance

BreachLock’s award-winning, analyst-recognized Penetration Testing as a Service puts CISOs and Security Leaders in the driver’s seat with the ultimate visibility and security controls in one cloud-native penetration testing platform. With complete oversight of the penetration testing process and control over the timelines to conduct mission-critical penetration testing, CISOs can administer pentesting like never before while setting up their teams for success.

With BreachLock, in-house teams gain enhanced security controls and capabilities along with expert-led engagements and customer support. Our in-house certified experts extend the bench of talent ready to go for our clients’ organizations. With result-driven penetration testing engagements, PTaaS clients can measurably reduce security risks and improve overall security and compliance outcomes without the added expenses of hiring expensive headcount or purchasing additional tooling.

Save Time with Faster Pentests and PTaaS Retesting, Reporting, and Scanning.

• Contain pentesting costs and stop unplanned scope creep.
• Expedite pentest reports with consistent results delivered on time, every time.
• Access to the award-winning BreachLock client portal with every PTaaS subscription and leverage vulnerability management benefits to scan, retest, and report early and often.

Maximize Value with Integrated DevOps Remediation.

• Remediate faster with integrated DevSecOps workflows within the pentesting lifecycle.
• Teams can continue to manage vulnerabilities using API ticketing integrations for on-going DevOps remediation activities and continuous vulnerability monitoring.

Simplify Penetration Testing and security validation.

• From confirming the scope to receiving the report to retesting patches, every BreachLock pentest is simple, streamlined, and easy.
• Enjoy the benefits of AI-enabled penetration testing with a proven leader in AI-assisted pentesting since 2018.
• There are no hidden fees, bottlenecks, or unforeseen delays.

Centralize Pentesting with PTaaS from BreachLock

The threat landscape is evolving at an unprecedented speed.

CISOs have an opportunity to centralize pentesting with a proactive mechanism that’s fast, effective, and simple to test defenses and stop preventable breaches before it’s too late with a proven, trusted PTaaS partner.

Start Planning for Penetration Testing as a Service Today

Today’s modern CISO can accelerate their penetration testing program with BreachLock, the proven leader in Penetration Testing as a Service, and secure their organization right now and for years to come with these three steps.

1. Perform an IT security audit. Are you getting everything you need out of your current security platforms
   and tools? How many vendors are you using? Are they compliant for your GRC program? Where do you see gaps in your current solutions?
2. Review BreachLock’s website and discover why over 1,000 clients in IT, software, healthcare, and financial
   services count on BreachLock for full-stack penetration testing services and security validation.
3. Schedule a discovery call with one of our pentesting experts and see how PTaaS can work for you.