Pentest and cybersecurity reports are a key deliverable for most of us. While the pentesting is where we add value and our technical skill differentiates us from competitors, it’s the report that your client sees and how they judge and remember the quality of your work. It’s important to get it right – even if you’re delivering results as tickets in a pentest as a service platform as well.
Unfortunately, pentest reporting can take days. Pentesters aren’t writers, much of the data is routine copy/paste, and even if you’ve built up an impressive library of vulnerabilities, recommendations, and technical snippets, you’ll still have to move them around. How do you speed up pentest reporting without sacrificing the quality of those reports?
1. Consolidate Data from Multiple Tools
You pentest from multiple tools and then often have to aggregate that all into one place. If your pentest reporting tool pulls that data for you, you’ll save all of the time you currently spend on copy/paste, deleting duplicate data, and merging files together. You want:
- Findings from across all your tooling
- Artifact capture
- Asset capture
For example, with Cyver Core, you can import from over 35 integrated tools or set up an API to automatically push data from your tools to the platform. In the platform, the tool will aggregate your findings per pentest project, merging duplicate findings, pulling data from your vulnerability libraries, and pulling evidence from those tools. You get everything in one place, right where you need it, without having to spend time manually copy-pasting things around.
2. Opt for Code-Free Tooling
Pentesters normally build or customize their own tooling. That makes sense. At the same time, it means investing in something that isn’t your core business and then continuing to maintain it. If you’re building your own report generation tool or worse, custom coding someone else’s, you’re investing a lot of time and effort into reporting and you might be surprised at how much that adds up.
Opt for tooling that offers:
- Customizable reports so you get the look and feel you want without code
- Modular report sections, content, and layouts
- Settings so you can change display options, charts, and more with the click of a button
If you have to invest in custom coding your platform, you’re tying yourself to that platform. Pick something that already delivers what you need out of the box.
3. Leverage Automation Everywhere it Makes Sense
Automation allows you to quickly build beautiful pentest reports over and over again without losing quality. Enabling automation means:
- Standardizing content so you can re-use information or generate it from tools. Fill-in-the-blanks templates with modular structure that you can import data into can save you hours on building reports
- Leveraging GenAI tools designed around pentesting, like Cyver Core’s LLeMy to take on the heavy lifting of writing up summaries and recommendations. You’ll always need custom content, start with a draft or tell GenAI what to write for you with Cyver, and you’ll automatically have something that looks and feels professional.
- Automated imports and data collation. If you have to manually merge findings or label all reoccurrences, you’re spending a lot of time you don’t have to.
- Look for criticality and prioritization rating engines that automate CVEs, CVSS, and other data using a scoring engine and methodology so you don’t have to do it manually
With Cyver Core’s pentest report generation tooling, you can generate a report based on project settings and methodology, automatically pull the findings from across your tools, and then use AI to generate a draft with writeups, recommendations, and summaries. Plus, you can merge your existing content and vulnerability libraries, add criticality rating based on common scoring methodologies, and link compliance metrics for benchmarking – automatically.
4. Develop Reusable Content Libraries
Most pentesters already maintain significant vulnerability libraries complete with writeups, recommendations, and technical snippets. Often, you’ll have content that you reuse in part or in whole every time specific methodology, specific vulnerability types, or even a specific client come up. Once you have those libraries, you can easily create complex and informative reports with only minimal custom writing.
With tools like Cyver, you can also automatically insert that content. For example, you can create custom tokens to insert reusable writeups and then make small tweaks so they are relevant to the current report. You can also automatically import methodology and writeups per section, with tokens to autofill data relevant to the specific report, methodology, and client. If you re-use the content, you can add it to your library and then import and reuse it wherever you need it.
5. Enable Collaboration
Most pentesters work in teams and that means you build reports together. Distributing work across teams allows you to collaborate on pentesting and adding content to the report. If your pentest report generation tooling enables collaboration, you can import files together rather than offloading all the work onto one person and bottlenecking progress. In addition, you’ll be able to create processes to ensure the report is reviewed, so that you can easily move the report to the final draft. You want:
- Multiple collaborators
- Data is consolidated across imports so duplicate files are still merged even when multiple people upload them
- Editor roles
- Commenting functionality
- Version control
With that, you’ll be able to speed up putting your initial report together, doing QA, and then finalizing it for the client.
These steps will help you speed up your pentest reporting, while still creating high quality reports that deliver value to the client.
If you want to learn more, watch our video:
