Penetration Testing: The Knowledge Hub @pentestingOK

How do you avoid vendor complacency without paying the Onboarding Tax? There are several ways to preserve your vendor's attacker mindset while avoiding the cost of starting from scratch. The best practices to maximize your offensive security budget: penetration-testing.com/penetration-te…

But there's a hidden cost: The new firm may spend so much time learning the environment that they only have time for superficial coverage, with the risk of paying a premium price just to get the same low-hanging vulnerabilities your previous vendor already reported.

Every two to three years, security leaders face a dilemma: Do we stick with our current pentesting firm, or is it time to get "fresh eyes" on our network? Rotating vendors eliminates blind spots, but introduces significant onboarding overhead. How to balance both forces? 🧵👇

The key question: do you need a QA engineer who understands your code, or a hacker who finds the attack paths to break it? Effective pentests require consultant rotation. 💡 Discover the key steps to make security as comprehensive as it is persistent: penetration-testing.com/penetration-te…

A hacker must look at systems from bizarre angles and intentionally break the rules. When staring at the same codebase for 12 months, they stop acting like a chaotic threat actor to start testing the app exactly how the Devs intended it to be used, losing that creative edge. 👇

Many companies sign a continuous pentest contract and demand the same consultant the entire time. Less time learning the architecture, more time hacking. Sounds logical, right? But staff augmentation is a fatal flaw in offensive security. Why does tester rotation matter? 🧵👇

If an attacker finds a SQL injection flaw, they don't bother fighting the production WAF. They simply exploit the unprotected staging server and walk right into your network. What does true remediation actually require? 💡 Read our full article: penetration-testing.com/penetration-te…

Because UAT is "just for testing," the Infra team decided not to pay for a second WAF license, leaving the staging server exposed or putting it behind a cheap, unconfigured firewall with default settings. That's why attackers and pentesters love staging environments. 👇

"We have fifty critical vulnerabilities. We just bought an enterprise WAF. We're secure." This is one of the most dangerous conversations in corporate IT today. Relying on a WAF as your main remediation strategy ignores the messy reality of how networks actually operate. 🧵👇

Professional testers must understand open source licensing: from Permissive Licenses to Copyleft and Custom & Source Available Licenses. Each one has its nuances and limits. Are you sure your engagement is legally covered? 💡 Read the full article: penetration-testing.com/compliance-and…

The risk for your business: If your vendor is using unlicensed software, any resulting damage to your network during the test could fall entirely on your shoulders, and potentially void the vendor's cyber liability insurance. How do you know if tools are legally compliant? 👇

When a company hires a penetration testing firm, they assume the tools being deployed are legally licensed. But the line between a free, open source, or commercially restricted tool is blurry, with the risk of crossing the legal boundaries. Where do these boundaries lie? 🧵👇

One thing is clear: A penetration test report is only valuable if your Board understands it. The real challenge: How do you translate technical findings into business risk, reputation, and revenue? 💡 Read our full article: penetration-testing.com/penetration-te…

For example: Your pentesting firm bypassed your WAF, chained a CSRF to an SSRF, and extracted root hashes from your database. You take the report to the Board to ask for a budget to fix it. They look at the acronyms, the price tag, and say: "We'll review it next quarter." 👇

A 100-page technical report? That's for the technical team. But, what if you need to communicate pentesting findings to the Board? The value of a penetration test dies if you cannot translate these issues to non-technical stakeholders. How to speak the Board's language? 🧵👇

Cloud & Service providers secure the infrastructure, but you are responsible for how you configure and interact with it. 🔐 If your test doesn't account for third-party integrations, you are ignoring your biggest attack surface. 💡 How can you do it? 👉 penetration-testing.com/penetration-te…

If your app relies on Stripe to call a webhook in order to track Successful Payments, can an attacker forcefully call and trick the callback to grant themselves a premium account without paying? If that happens, that's not Stripe's problem. That's also your responsibility. 👇

"AWS spends millions on security. Therefore, my application is secure." 🔒 This is the ‘Shared Responsibility Myth,’ and the reason why your application could be more exposed than you think. Learn why this is a dangerous misconception in modern app security. 🧵👇