Ordinarily for a pentest team – and certainly for the client – having findings change between retests should be a good thing. After all, the whole point of a pentest is to identify vulnerabilities and help organizations remediate them, and so if a weakness shows up at any stage of the process it’s a sign that the issue is being properly tracked and addressed.
Not least, a finding might change from a confirmed vulnerability to a false positive, meaning the client won’t have to spend time and resources remediating an issue that doesn’t actually pose a risk. In any case, change between retests is common, and it’s a demonstration of the effort a good pentest team puts into improving a client’s security posture.
It’s just a shame there’s such a high hidden cost. This is all to do with the complexity that already exists within the pentesting workflow. Across the board, pentest reporting involves a huge number of moving parts, from identifying and documenting findings to validating remediation and communicating all the outcomes. When something changes in that workflow, it introduces a blah that can be incredibly detrimental.
Tracking the Same Finding
One of the main problems is that it becomes difficult to maintain a clear history of the same finding throughout the entire remediation process. When findings change between the initial assessment and a retest, teams need to understand whether they’re looking at a vulnerability that has been updated, resolved, or an entirely new issue altogether.
Without a consistent way of tracking findings over time, however, important context can easily be lost. Maybe it’s changing risk scores or previous evidence. Whatever the detail may be, the challenge of tracking findings accurately creates a significant amount of friction for both teams and their clients, as time is spent working out what has changed rather than focusing on whether the risk has actually been addressed.
Comparing Reports
Leading on from this, the act of comparing reports becomes equally time-consuming. Rather than simply reviewing whether vulnerabilities have been remediated, pentest teams might need to manually compare different versions of findings to ensure they’re reviewing the right thing.
This becomes especially challenging when multiple assessments, testers, or reporting formats are involved. In these instances, even small differences in wording can make it hard to identify whether progress has genuinely been made, and if a single detail slips through the net, that puts the entire report in jeopardy.
Loss of Confidence
Clients are looking for consistency. The cybersecurity landscape is getting more complex by the day, with new techniques such as AI-powered social engineering and automated vulnerability exploitation increasing the speed and sophistication of threats, and so their defences need to be as robust as possible.
If just one vulnerability is missed, the consequences can be dire, which is why clients need complete confidence that the reports pentest teams are providing are as accurate and reliable as possible. They will only have that confidence if the team itself has confidence, and how can they if their reporting process is so difficult to manage at scale? The reality is that changes can happen, and so whether they like it or not, there’s always a chance that important details can be overlooked.
The Bigger Picture
This is indicative of a much wider problem in the pentesting space. Yes, changes between retests can be problematic, but so too can incomplete documentation, duplicated findings, and an untrackable remediation process. The truth is, as engagements become more complex, pentest teams suffer as a result, since they’re expected to manage more tools, more findings, and more testing methodologies than ever before.
The challenge is no longer simply identifying vulnerabilities, it’s maintaining a clear, consistent reporting process – and that’s where our solution becomes so important for helping teams scale without sacrificing quality. By centralizing the entire process, we’re giving teams a single source of truth for managing findings from discovery through to remediation and retesting, so instead of treating every assessment as a separate process, they can maintain a clear history of each vulnerability.
Essentially, this means consultants no longer have to manually piece together information to understand what’s changed. On the contrary, findings remain connected, with teams able to quickly identify whether an issue has been updated or whether anything needs further attention. At the same time, this standardized workflow helps ensure that every engagement follows the same reporting process, giving teams the consistency they need to be confident in their processes and deliver results that they know are accurate and reliable.
Conclusion
It might not be obvious that changed findings are detrimental to the overall pentesting process – this is why it’s a ‘hidden’ cost, since the impact is often hard to trace.
But so many pentest teams that don’t have a centralized reporting platform would be able to trace back many mistakes to that lack of structure, which is even more frustrating since it’s a flaw in the process rather than a flaw in their technical expertise. A solution that brings everything together and maintains consistency is the only way to fix this, and even more than that: it’s the only way to scale as pentests grow more complex and greater accuracy is needed.
