COLLABORATING ON PENTEST REPORTING WITH YOUR PENTEST TEAM

by Cyver

Most pentest and cybersecurity companies start out small. You have one or two pentesters at most, and those pentesters largely work alone to deliver results to clients. For most cybersecurity firms, the goal is to grow — and that means eventually expanding the capacity of your pentest team. At first, you’re likely to do so with time-saving initiatives like automating manual work, using report generation, and improving processes to reduce overhead. Working smarter not harder and leveraging the power of digital work automation is always the best way to start expansion.

Yet, as you bring on more pentesters and cybersecurity experts into your team, you need ways to ensure that your pentesters collaborate across the team, so more people can work on the same project and deliver results to a report, at the same quality, and with predictable quality and results every time.

You need a process, you need workflows, and you need mechanisms in place for quality control, work delegation, and editing reports together — as a team.

WHY WORK ON COLLABORATION INSIDE YOUR PENTEST TEAM?

Your pentest team is working together to create a deliverable for the client. That often means splitting up testing, sharing workloads, and handing different aspects of the pentest to individual hackers based on their expertise and talents. As more people enter the mix, you still need a way to deliver a consistent deliverable to your client.

Pentest management software allows you to manage that collaboration by keeping everyone on the same page, putting transparency processes in place, and ensuring you have quality controls.

• Providing a consistent experience to the client. Pentest reports and results should be the same quality across your organization, no matter who is working on them or delivering them.
• Offering transparency, so client’s have clear insight into what is being tested, when, and how. That means they can make better decisions around what they do around the test, their teams are prepared, and they have insight into when they have to take action.
• Transparency and quality control metrics mean you can deliver a more consistent product to the client, while making checks, assurance, and reviewing each other’s work a standard part of the process.

WHAT DO YOU NEED FOR PENTEST TEAM COLLABORATION?

• Workflows — Everyone needs to be on the same page. That means you need clearly defined tasks and workflows, with progress tracking. Everyone needs to know what happens next, when they’re responsible for next steps, and what next steps are. That’s especially important if you’re delivering testing for compliance or following specific methodology. However, having your entire team on the same workflow means that all of your client communication, asset collection, scoping, data reporting, descriptions, etc., happen in the same way every time. That will eventually mean one pentester can take over from another where necessary, because the process is the same.
• Task Assignment & Overview — You don’t have to turn pentesting into hierarchy to assign tasks and see how work is progressing. However, having the option to assign work means you can trace who is doing what, when, and who has ownership of a task. That makes it easier to delegate work across the team, to ensure that everything is being picked up by someone, and to more easily track workloads to completed work and input during the reporting stage.
• Merging Findings — If you’re collaborating on a pentest, you need ways to minimize duplicate work and duplicate findings. You’ll always find the same vulnerabilities more than once, especially if multiple people are testing. You need the option to automatically merge those findings across imports, so you don’t report work more than once.
• Progress Tracking — Your workflow and pentest management software has to enable transparency, for the team and for the client. That means pentesters should be able to log in to see the progress of existing pentest, what’s on their to-do list, and what’s on their colleague’s to-do list. This enables better understanding of resources, better delegation, and more insight into when and how work is due.
• Editing & Review Functionality — The vulnerability findings and the pentest report are always going to be the most important part of the pentest, because it’s what the client pays for. That remains true whether the client wants vulnerability findings as tickets, which can immediately move into work management platforms like Jira, or full reports. You need options to collaborate on writeups, to re-use existing material, and to check each other’s work to ensure consistency in terms of language use, information given, quality of write ups, etc.

Eventually, collaborating across your pentest team is an important part of delivering a consistent experience to the client.

“Specifically, I wanted to ensure that we were delivering a consistent product to our clients, no matter how big the team grew,” Says Theodor Craggs, co-founder and director at Cybersecurity firm CyberInsight, “We want to ensure that no matter how big our team is, we provide a consistent experience to the client, and Cyver Core enabled that”

If you’d like to learn more about how Cyver Core can help, contact us for a free demo.