Most pentesters are accustomed to working in a relatively informal way, typically with a small team or no team at all. That often means a relatively unstructured approach, where you use tools, keep track of pentests, and manage results with little to no management tooling. Often, that means building reports, tracking pentest vulnerabilities, and even tracking clients inside tools like Excel. While, to an extent, there’s nothing wrong with that, as Excel is a versatile enough tool, times are changing. And, for most of us, changing to adopt to new technologies and possibilities creates opportunities, not just for saving time on work but also for delivering better experiences to the client.
For pentesters, that shift is pentest management.
What is Pentest Management?
Pentest Management can be thought of as a pentest-specific approach to work management platforms. Most pentesters have some experience with many of those. For example, Jira, Asana, Trello, etc., all count as work management platforms. These tools deliver project visibility, timelines, Kanban boards, and proejct/task breakdown and assignment – making it easier to scale pentests out across teams and manage work. While many pentesters have adapted to using solutions like Jira for pentest management, they’re never ideal, because pentesting will always have elements and requirements that don’t align with traditional work management platforms.
So, pentest management is the process of creating a platform specifically catering to the needs of pentesters and pentests. In the case of Cyver Core that means:
- Customizable pentest templates per client, so you can quickly repeat pentests without re-doing work
- Pentest checklists, to track work, align work with compliance norms, and show transparency in work processes to clients. Pentest checklists also make it easier to delegate tasks across teams, with different people assigned to different checklist items, so you can always see who’s doing what
- Kanban boards
- Pentest timelines to track how pentests fit into the schedule, when pentests are already scheduled, and when you have space in the calendar for new work
- Integrated scheduling tools, where clients can request a pentest based on an existing template and fit it into the schedule
- Compliance frameworks and norms, to track how work maps to those norms
- Automated finding imports directly from tools like Nessus and Burp
- Pentest report automation and generation, using client data and templates
Essentially, you get the work management of tooling like Jira, but with customization and tools built specifically around pentesting.
Why Use Work Management Platforms for Pentesting?
Pentest management platforms like Cyver Core make it possible to reduce the manual work and overhead related to pentesting – because you can automate much of it, keep everything in one place, and reduce work management to simple processes and workflows. For example, our clients use it to:
Reduce Overhead Time – Overhead is time spent managaging work – or work about work. It’s the time you spend planning, scheduling, remembering what’s on the to-do list, making checklists, finding files, etc. Pentest management tools help you to reduce that time by up to 80%, with reusable checklists, work assignment, and notifications – so you don’t have to do everything manually.
Automation – Automation is more than just scanners, it’s also work management, importing vulnerabilities from tools, auto-filling data from vulnerability libraries, etc. With pentest management, you can automate all those tasks, reducing workloads for tasks like report generation by as much as 70-85%.
Client Experience – Most clients are already using digital work management and pentesting is one of the few times they have to switch back to PDF deliverables and breaking everything down themselves. Moving clients to a pentest management platform means less work on your end creating quotes, better vulnerability management and remediation on the client’s end, and more integration into the client’s workflows, processes, and teams. The result, happier clients, and better cyber security.
Work management platforms have taken over nearly everywhere. It makes sense for pentesters to adopt similar, digital processes. And, with pentest management platforms like Cyver Core, those processes are customized around the specific needs of pentesting and cybersecurity. If you want to learn more, download our free whitepaper here. Or, schedule a demo to see the live platform in action.