From Periodic to Persistent: Combining PTaaS and AEV for Real-World Risk Coverage

In a world where new cyberthreats emerge at lightning speed, continuous and proactive threat management is crucial to protecting enterprise assets and maintaining business continuity.

To continuously and proactively manage threats and exposures, cybersecurity teams need to maintain real-world risk awareness. To do this effectively, they need solutions that help them to:

• Keep track of and identify assets and their associated vulnerabilities
• Understand which exposures represent real business risk
• Identify security weaknesses that could be exploited by real attackers, and how
• Test existing security controls
• Validate exposures against defenses

Two solutions that, together, support all of the above are Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV).

PTaaS: Breaking the Limits of Legacy Pentesting

PTaaS is a transformative, data-centric approach to penetration testing (pentesting) that integrates advanced security testing automation technology with human expertise. This powerful human-tech integration empowers human pentesters to continuously and scalably test an organization’s environment by offloading the testing for known, easily identifiable vulnerabilities to automated scanners, allowing them to focus their manual efforts on identifying more complex vulnerabilities with hacker-like creativity and knowledge. In doing so, they can help organizations proactively identify and address cybersecurity vulnerabilities and stop security breaches before they can cause too much damage.

Unlike legacy, 100% human-dependent penetration testing, which only offers point-in-time assessments and is resource-intensive by nature, PTaaS delivers scalable, repeatable, and continuously available testing. PTaaS adapts to complex, modern environments, without compromising coverage or speed, helping organizations meet compliance mandates, reduce risk exposure windows, and ensure the efficacy of security controls.

PTaaS is delivered through SaaS platforms that unify testing, remediation, and reporting into a single interface to streamline workflows across security and development teams and facilitate direct communication with pentesters. By integrating automation and human-driven testing in one place, security teams get real-time visibility into vulnerabilities, helping to accelerate remediation timelines and reduce the overhead traditionally associated with manual pentesting cycles.

All in all, PTaaS offers continuous, cost-effective, and scalable pentesting to effectively manage your entire attack surfaces and safeguard business-critical assets – while also increasing pentesting ROI and overall security maturity.

While PTaaS is a critical component of modern continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) strategies, enterprises can enhance real-world risk coverage and strengthen defenses even further by also implementing Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV).

AEV: Uncovering Real Exposures and Prioritizing True Risk

AEV goes beyond simply detecting vulnerabilities. It validates their exploitability in real-world scenarios. By simulating attacker behavior across the cyber kill chain, AEV replicates how adversaries move laterally, escalate privileges, and chain exposures to reach high-value assets. These simulations use real-world attack techniques, such as phishing, malware deployment, and privilege abuse, to assess how well your defenses hold up under pressure.

The best AEV solutions, particularly those that are Gen AI-powered, are designed to validate exposures against your actual defenses, so you can uncover real exposures and prioritize the risks that impact the business most. Moreover, you get data-driven and actionable insights that will detail:

• Validated, multi-step attack path visualization that shows how adversaries can progress through your environment based on existing vulnerabilities and defenses
• Exploitability-based risk scoring that reflects real-world likelihood, not just CVSS
• Business impact context to understand which exposures put critical systems or data at risk
• Root cause analytics to pinpoint why exposures exist and how to remediate them
• Strategic remediation guidance mapped to attacker logic and threat actor behaviors
• The probable business impact of each scenario

All in all, AEV doesn’t just show you what could go wrong; it also details how it would go wrong, and furthermore, what to do about it. At its core, AEV provides a more comprehensive and up-to-date picture of real-world risk so you can identify which exposures need immediate remediation, eliminate the root causes of exposures at scale, and consistently maintain a robust security posture across a complex environment.

AEV + PTaaS: Complementary Solutoins for Comprehensive Real-World Risk Coverage

While AEV is fully automated and offers immense scalability benefits, that does not diminish the value and creativity that a human penetration tester brings to the table when it comes to simulating complex and novel attacks. PTaaS and AEV complement each other with this duality in mind, enabling hybrid models where humans take over when needed. When combined harmoniously in a single strategy, automation and Gen AI offer breadth and consistency, while humans offer depth and creativity. In the case of both AEV and PTaaS, the technology is not there to compete with human pentesters and red teamers, but to enable them to do more impactful work.

In sum, AEV:

• Provides efficient, automated testing through real-world attack simulations and actionable insights
• Is ideal for automating repetitive, large-scale testing using pre-defined attack scenarios
• Can run attack simulations across multiple threat vectors and different systems and environments to provide scalable exposure management and defense validation

In sum, PTaaS:

• Provides deeper testing by combining automated testing with human-led engagement
• Is ideal for testing for complex attack vectors that cannot be easily accommodated by AEV automations and attack scenarios
• Provides flexibility in testing frequency and testing scope, allowing on-demand testing for any environment

The bottom line: AEV and PTaaS are complementary solutions that provide a holistic view of real-world risks and enable more comprehensive security validation, exposure management, and risk management – all in a scalable, cost-effective manner.

Uncover Real Exposures and Accelerate Risk Prioritization with BreachLock AEV and PTaaS

Together, BreachLock’s PTaaS and AEV solutions offer a powerful, integrated approach to modern offensive security that delivers continuous visibility, real-world risk validation, and smarter remediation prioritization based on actual business risk.

BreachLock PTaaS offers scalable, flexible penetration testing for organizations, whether they’re looking for continuous penetration testing or periodic penetration testing. It combines automated coverage with expert-driven manual testing to uncover vulnerabilities across your attack surface in real time. BreachLock AEV complements PTaaS by simulating real adversary behavior to validate which exposures are exploitable and showing you how attackers could move through your environment.

By combining both, you gain a comprehensive view of risk from initial vulnerability discovery to full attack path validation so you can mobilize your resources to proactively address exposures, reduce remediation timelines, and drive higher ROI from your security investments.

Ready to elevate your security strategy? Reach out to learn how BreachLock’s PTaaS and AEV solutions can help you stay ahead of attackers.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in offensive security, delivering scalable and continuous security testing. Trusted by global enterprises, BreachLock provides human-led and AI-powered attack surface management, penetration testing, red teaming, and adversarial exposure validation (AEV) services that help security teams stay ahead of adversaries. With a mission to make proactive security the new standard, BreachLock is shaping the future of cybersecurity through automation, data-driven intelligence, and expert-driven execution.

Know Your Risk. Contact BreachLock today!

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BreachLock Labs