Annual penetration testing serves as the baseline for cybersecurity best practice and can help businesses identify and address vulnerabilities before they turn into exploitable threats. While some businesses assume that once a year pen testing is sufficient, it’s worth understanding that it is a minimum requirement rather than a comprehensive security strategy.

As businesses rely more on technology, the need to identify and remediate vulnerabilities becomes ever more pressing to avoid devastating breaches. Automated penetration testing offers a revolutionary approach to vulnerability detection, utilising cutting-edge tools to mimic hacker behaviour and uncover weaknesses in systems. This method not only enhances the efficiency of assessments but also significantly reduces the time and resources required compared to traditional penetration testing.

Threat-led penetration testing brings together specialist offensive (red team) security skills and threat intelligence to enable businesses to proactively test and identify any weaknesses, deficiencies or gaps in their controls and counteractive measures that could be exploited by threat actors. In this article, we set out what threat-led pen testing is, how it relates to the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the testing requirements included as part of the new EU regulation.

Web application penetration testing involves performing a simulated attack on a web app to determine weaknesses that hackers can exploit. The testing process uses emulations of real-world attacks to identify hidden attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), or cross-site request forgery (CSRF). What is the worst that could happen if you don’t continuously test your web application for vulnerabilities?

In the context of penetration (pen) testing, false positives are where the testing tools or methods identify a security vulnerability or issue that doesn’t actually exist. Essentially, a false alarm. This can happen for a few reasons, such as misconfigurations in the testing tools, incorrect assumptions, or environmental factors.

While Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) know how crucial a consistent enterprise penetration testing program is to their cybersecurity program, convincing their fellow leaders and board members to invest in pen testing amid other budget demands can be challenging. The key is to speak to these leaders in terms they readily understand, focusing largely on risk.

Are You Testing for Compliance or Preparing for Real Attacks? Cybersecurity isn’t just about checking boxes—it’s about staying ahead of threats. Many businesses rely on Penetration Testing (Pentesting) and Red Teaming to identify vulnerabilities. However, these traditional methods often assume that attackers play by the same rules as defenders. Reality has other plans.

Manual penetration testing is a meticulous process performed by skilled cybersecurity professionals who simulate real-world attack scenarios to identify weaknesses in systems, applications, and networks. In contrast to the automated approach, manual testing leverages human expertise, creativity, and critical thinking to detect vulnerabilities in the unique context of your organisation’s infrastructure.