Penetration Testing in Action: 3 Real-World Insights to Help Boost Your Security Posture

Introduction

The modern-day enterprise threat landscape is evolving and accelerating at a faster pace than ever before in the era of AI. To minimize the risk of cyberattacks and protect business assets from compromise, security teams not only need full visibility into their organizations’ IT environments, but they must proactively understand how attackers may breach them and implement fixes to build resilience.

This is where penetration testing comes into play.

What is Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing is an offensive security testing methodology in which pentesters or “ethical hackers” deliberately hack into company networks, applications, and other systems, simulating real-world cyberattacks to identify and safely exploit vulnerabilities. The goal of a pentest is to identify the organization’s security vulnerabilities and provide recommendations that can help security practitioners strengthen their firm’s defense strategies and security posture.

That said, there are a few common mistakes made during pentesting that can prevent organizations from addressing the most critical vulnerabilities, create a false sense of security, and even increase their risk for an attack. In this blog, we’ll explore three real-world lessons that can help your organization avoid these mistakes and effectively leverage pentesting to strengthen cybersecurity in today’s complex security landscape.

Insight #1. Define a Clear Scope

A well-defined penetration testing scope clarifies the rules of engagement and constraints under which penetration testers must operate. The scope tells pentesters which systems are to be tested and why, when pentesting should take place to avoid operational downtime, which testing techniques are allowed and prohibited, and any other details relevant to a penetration test.

This helps pentesters ensure that a penetration test goes smoothly without operational disruptions and that their efforts are focused on finding critical vulnerabilities that pose meaningful risk to the business. A strong scope also sets expectations on deliverables and communication, so both the security team and the testers stay aligned throughout the engagement and can act quickly on any high-impact findings.

If testers begin a pentest without a clearly defined scope, they may end up wasting time and money on low-value targets that don’t align with the organization’s key objectives. A poorly defined scope may also cause critical assets to be excluded, leaving blind spots unidentified and susceptible to exploitation by threat actors. These issues may lower the impact and ROI of the pentesting engagement.

In addition to specifying the basics of which assets should be tested when scoping your pentest, it’s best to get clarity into the following elements:

• Current system, network, and device configurations
• Existing defenses and security controls
• Testing techniques
• Testing time windows
• Attacker profiles to be simulated
• Rate limits on scanning
• High-risk actions to be avoided (e.g., simulating DoS attacks)
• Post-testing reporting requirements

Your penetration testing service provider can also typically provide expert guidance to help with scoping your pentest to ensure that all critical information is outlined before they begin.

Insight #2. Test More Frequently

For many companies, penetration testing is nothing more than a yearly exercise undertaken to check off a few boxes on a cybersecurity or compliance checklist. But this one-off approach doesn’t fit the bill of what modern enterprises need to maintain an adequate level of cyber resilience.

Vulnerabilities don’t only appear yearly before an organization’s annual pentest. They emerge weekly, and even daily. Of the 43,052 vulnerabilities discovered and publicly disclosed in 2025, 1,912 were discovered within the first three weeks of November alone.¹ In fact, 30+ vulnerabilities were discovered in a single day of November (November 17th). With yearly pentesting, these quickly emerging vulnerabilities may not be identified, much less remediated quickly enough to prevent them from being exploited in a cyberattack. Conducting penetration tests more frequently or even continuously can help alleviate these issues.

While traditional, fully manual penetration testing is notoriously time-consuming and labor-intensive, resulting in long lead times and lacking continuity, modern Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) solutions use a combination of human pentesters and automation to overcome these challenges. With PTaaS, skilled human testers manually simulate real-world attacks to proactively uncover vulnerabilities while automated workflows and even AI technologies handle the repetitive tasks, such as report generation, evidence gathering, and common vulnerability identification, that slow down traditional engagements.

This hybrid PTaaS approach shortens penetration testing cycles, helps organizations broaden their coverage, and makes it possible to run targeted penetration tests whenever new assets are deployed, new code is pushed, or a high-severity vulnerability is disclosed. Rather than waiting months for their annual penetration test to happen, security teams can identify critical vulnerabilities in real time, so they can be remediated immediately to proactively reduce risk.

Organizations that increase the frequency of their penetration testing efforts can better keep pace with the evolving vulnerability landscape, reduce exposure windows for attackers, and maintain more accurate, up-to-date visibility of their security posture cost-effectively.

Insight #3. Prioritize Findings Based on Actual Risk

For most organizations, fixing every vulnerability identified during a pentest is an unattainable endeavor with the sheer volume of findings they’re often presented with, compounded by resource constraints. Prioritizing vulnerabilities based on actual risk is essential to making the most out of a penetration test in terms of reducing risk without straining resources to make a positive impact.

A good penetration testing report should help security teams determine the most critical threats to the organization so they can allocate resources accordingly and make a clear case for additional funding when needed. Instead of treating all findings equally, teams need to focus on the vulnerabilities that truly increase the likelihood or impact of a breach. Effective prioritization goes beyond severity scores and considers the broader context of the environment, the business, and the threat landscape.

When evaluating which vulnerabilities to address first, teams should prioritize vulnerabilities for remediation based on:

• Exploitability: How easily could an attacker exploit the vulnerability?
• Asset criticality: Does the affected system store sensitive data or support mission-critical operations?
• Exposure level: Is the asset accessible from the internet, internally accessible, or isolated?
• Likelihood of attacker success: How does the vulnerability fit into real-world attack paths and kill-chain progression?
• Business impact: What operational, financial, or reputational damage could exploitation cause?

Using these criteria, organizations can focus their remediation efforts where they matter most and turn penetration testing results into measurable, real-world risk reduction.

Get Ahead of Evolving Security Vulnerabilities with BreachLock’s Pentesting Solutions

BreachLock’s 2025 Penetration Testing Intelligence Report reveals that in 2025, “real-world exploitability rose sharply across sectors, fueled by a convergence of outdated systems, cloud misconfigurations, and increasingly sophisticated multi-step attack chains”.² In today’s threat landscape, it can be difficult to reduce cybersecurity risk with periodic assessments that don’t reflect an organization’s true risk.

To proactively stay ahead of rapidly emerging vulnerabilities, organizations need a reliable and cost-effective way to continuously identify, prioritize, and remediate exploitable risks. BreachLock’s Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) makes this simple by combining expert human pentesters with AI-driven analysis and automated workflows to maximize accuracy, coverage, and scalability. This modern hybrid approach to penetration testing enables organizations to test as broadly and as frequently as needed without the high costs associated with traditional, manual pentesting.

BreachLock PTaaS is delivered through a unified platform that consolidates all findings into a single source of truth, offering clear vulnerability prioritization and actionable remediation recommendations. Our breadth of coverage spans external and internal networks, web applications, APIs, cloud environments, AI systems, IoT assets, and more, ensuring full visibility across the entire enterprise attack surface.

With the ability to run tests continuously or on demand, security teams gain real-time insight into their exposure, reduce mean time to remediate (MTTR), and can allocate their existing resources strategically. Security teams that take advantage of BreachLock’s PTaaS solution benefit from streamlined, highly efficient penetration testing that overcomes the constraints of fragmented pentesting tools and reduces reliance on costly one-off assessments that don’t reflect true, real-time security posture.

Accelerate your pentesting program today! Schedule a free discovery call with an expert.

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 as a Service (PTaaS), Red Teaming, and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) solutions 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.

References

1. National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2025). NVD Dashboard. https://nvd.nist.gov/general/nvd-dashboard

2. BreachLock (2025). 2025 Penetration Testing Intelligence Report. https://downloads.breachlock.com/2025-penetration-testing-intelligence-report

Author

BreachLock Labs