Ask a security leader what their last pentest cost, and they'll give you a number.
Ask how many hours their team spent getting that pentest over the line… and you might hear a few choice words.
When that frustration compounds across multiple pentests per year, you’ve got a recipe for:
- A security leader on the edge
- A team that spends more time on admin than actual security
In fact, remediation and improving security often feel afterthoughts compared to the grinding slog of scheduling, completing, and evidencing pentest engagements.
So what exactly makes pentests so frustrating? And what specifically needs to be addressed to help security teams maximise testing coverage without losing their sanity in the process?
All process no profit
There’s a lot that goes into a traditional pentest. Outside of the actual testing, there’s a ton of process-oriented work that has to be done. It usually looks something like this:
- Scheduling back-and-forth
- Scoping calls to agree what's in (and out of) scope
- Statement of work and procurement sign-off
- Setting up test accounts, credentials, and access
- Answering tester questions
- Reviewing, reformatting, and ticketing findings
- Follow-up questions and clarifications
- Arranging retests for fixed findings
None of these tasks is huge on its own. Maybe each step takes a couple of hours. Some more, some less. Which is already a headache, but when you’re running multiple pentests per year, it becomes a full-fledged internal function.
The result is that, apart from the actual testing process, your team spends an enormous amount of time on admin tasks. Quite possibly more time than they spend remediating findings.
That’s before we consider scheduling delays. From the first enquiry to a delivered report, the minimum time you can expect to wait is 6-8 weeks. For popular providers, it’s often much longer, so you’re effectively taxed on your desire to engage with higher quality pentesters.
This is already a major headache, and this is just for one pentest.
The more tests you run, the more this process is running constantly, and your team will often be dealing with admin for multiple pentests at the same time. And when your developers are under pressure to ship regularly, it becomes a serious hindrance to your business objectives.
By the time findings arrive, the code has most likely changed, and the developers who wrote it have long since moved on. Before they can fix anything, they have to get back up to speed, which is yet another speedbump in your roadmap. In reality, this means important scopes get tested less often than they should, because the alternative is simply unacceptable to the business.
So, scopes get deprioritised, and the long tail of applications and APIs goes untested, year after year.
Death by PDF
So scheduling and process admin are a problem. We all know this, although it’s surprising how often teams underestimate the impact. Next up, we have another common issue that’s larger than it first appears: the PDF report.
Pentest results have long been delivered as static reports, with no easy connection to ticketing systems and remediation workflows. The first problem with this is that someone has to turn each finding into a ticket, assign it to the right people, and track it through to a fix.
Again, this is a problem that gets worse as your program grows. Not only do you have to deal with more PDFs, but each provider formats reports slightly differently… and they score and prioritise severity differently. A "high" from one provider might be a "medium" from another, and quite likely neither will score findings quite the way your team would.
This leaves security teams with two options:
- Waste even more time normalising findings for consistent prioritisation.
- Accept that remediation resources may end up focused on the wrong issues.
Clearly, neither option is great for security outcomes.
Even good news is bad
What if the pentest comes back clean, with no notable findings? Good news, right?
Well… maybe.
When a traditional pentest finds nothing, you're taking the provider's word that they tested the scope thoroughly, using a proven methodology. That's difficult to evidence, whether it's to your board, an auditor, or a customer asking for assurance.
And yet, clean reports should be the goal. The UK's NCSC says third-party pentests should be used to verify your own expectations. This is particularly relevant for heavily tested production scopes that are known to be secure. You need to validate them, but you’re not expecting a lot of findings.
In other words, a mature security program should produce clean pentest reports at least some of the time. So "no findings" is good news…. but only if you can prove thorough testing has really happened.
If you can’t evidence testing methodology, you’re likely to experience pushback internally and from auditors if your pentests come back with no findings.
Of course, pentest providers are all too aware that a blank report can look like poor value. So reports often come padded with "hygiene" findings: missing security headers, TLS configuration issues, informational observations, and so on.
While it’s hard to blame providers for this, it’s frustrating for security teams who now have to wade through low-value findings (that they likely already knew about) to reach the few that matter.
Long live (agentic) pentests
Agentic Pentest was built to deal with exactly these problems.
In terms of direct costs, Agentic Pentest campaigns come in at less than half the cost of a comparable traditional pentest. That’s a big deal, but it pales compared to the process improvements:
- No scoping calls or scheduling. Choose your scope and launch a campaign immediately whenever needed.
- Same-day results. Test around your release schedule, and get findings to developers while the code is still fresh in their minds.
- No PDFs. Findings appear directly in the YesWeHack Vulnerability Center, where they can easily be assigned, tracked, and remediated using your existing workflows.
- Consistent report scoring. Every finding follows the same format and risk assessment, so prioritisation is straightforward.
- Exploitable findings only. Every issue is validated and reproduced before it's reported. If exploitability can't be proven, it doesn't make the cut. No filler, no noise.
- Prove coverage and methodology. The Activity Report records what was tested and how, which leads were investigated, and why each was progressed or discarded. So you can prove thorough testing has occurred even when your secure scopes return few or no findings.
No more wasted time. No more internal cottage industry for managing pentest admin. And much more flexibility to test when and where you need it, without waiting for an available slot.
To see Agentic Pentest in action, get in touch.
