Are You Ready for a High-Quality Penetration Test?

Security experts agree: penetration tests - or pentests - are an extremely useful activity for your cybersecurity practice. Experience, however, shows not all pentests are created equal, and you need to assess:

1. What is a high-quality pentest?
2. When is a pentest best suited?

What is a high-quality pentest?

When choosing a Managed Security Services Provider or MSSP, most will offer pentesting as part of their portfolio. There are some signs you should look out for before selecting a pentest provider:

• It’s not a capture the flag exercise: ethical hackers are there to help you improve your security, not to prove they are better than you.
• Ethical hackers should understand your security approach and strategy, as well as being fully up-to-date with the real-world attacks. This is a rapidly changing area and staying current is not a given.
• Running a pentest should not disrupt your business: ethical hackers should be helping you improve your security and prioritize your investments. Pentests should never prevent you from conducting business normally.
• The report you receive at the end of the test should be clear, concise and immediately actionable.

To discover the five signs of a high-quality pentest, read the NWG ebook? (Our marketing content is ungated: no sign-in required).

When should you consider a high-quality pentest?

Pentests aren’t vulnerability scans. Pentests help you truly assess your actual risks and, most importantly, prioritize your security investments.

Therefore, if you are drafting your security strategy - or next year’s budget priorities - and need to understand where to invest, set benchmarks, and prove the value of your security strategy, you should look at a high-quality pentest.

Additionally, if you are currently running pentests but the results aren’t understandable or actionable, you should probably start considering other options.

Find out when and how to implement high-quality pentests in our ebook (not gated).? To review a sanitized deliverable for a high-quality pentest, talk to us.