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.
CISOs understand that cyberattacks are a bigger organizational threat than ever and that in-house security teams are already understaffed and overworked. Security teams also generally lack the specialized expertise to identify vulnerabilities and develop a roadmap for remediation or patching, which a quality pen testing firm will provide.
It's up to CISOs to explain these realities to their non-technical counterparts, helping them grasp the magnitude of the risk, as well as the value and trustworthiness of a reputable pen testing partner.
It's common for finance and other executives to assume that an automated vulnerability assessment is sufficient to protect digital assets. Few members of the C-suite inherently understand that while vulnerability testing is a vital cog, pen testing goes far deeper and offers specific solutions to credible threats.
While non-technical executives may know little about technology, there's one thing they understand well: risk. When a CISO is asked how the company can afford penetration testing on top of other digital security measures, an effective response is to flip the question around: "Can we afford not to protect our customer data, intellectual property, and reputation from today's relentless attacks?"
Any CEO, CFO, or Chief Risk Officer who keeps up with the business press will see the validity of this argument. Almost daily, another prominent business admits it has suffered a breach, often with devastating results.
Such breaches cost victim organizations in revenue, reputation, downtime, and market value. It's no wonder that according to IBM's 2024 data breach report, the cost of a breach often rises year over year – most recently to an average of $4.8 million.
Those figures are not hard to comprehend when you consider instances such as the high-profile Change Healthcare attack that had repercussions throughout the healthcare industry or even lower-profile ones that contributed to forcing one hospital to close entirely. To explore more examples and learn about this and other threats, explore Trustwave's vertical-specific threat reports, covering industries such as financial services, hospitality, retail, manufacturing, education, and the public sector.
Top executives and board members will readily see that the cost of industry-leading penetration testing pales in comparison to the potential consequences of a breach.
Some executives may hesitate to engage third-party testing partners because they fear that the very firm they're hiring will steal intellectual property or use vulnerabilities to launch an attack. While it may seem like the plot of a bad movie, this objection isn't entirely unreasonable.
That's why the reputation and professionalism of the testing partner is so important. CISOs need to be able to convince leadership that their pen tester is indeed trustworthy. One way to do that is to contract with a firm whose pen testers meet industry certifications such as CREST, an international body that represents and supports the technical information security market. Another is enlisting a pen testing firm that guarantees its testers are full-time employees, not subcontractors whose team members may not be well-known or fully vetted.
Another common sticking point for executive teams is the need for third-party penetration testing. They look at the IT organizational chart and ask whether a few staffers can probe for bugs.
There are two answers to this question. First, IT staffers are overworked and have been for some time. A long-term global labor shortage means corporate tech and data security groups will remain stressed for the foreseeable future. So, the idea of grabbing a couple of idle IT folks and asking them to run pen tests is a non-starter.
Second, in-house tech workers, no matter how talented, are too close to the company's assets and systems to probe them for vulnerabilities dispassionately. That's why companies have quality assurance teams – to act as a check on the work of others. By the same token, you shouldn't ask an IT employee to probe for weaknesses in an app or network they helped develop or operate day-to-day.
Finally, there's the question of expertise and experience. Penetration testing is both a science and an art. With more than 250 security consultants, threat hunters, incident responders, forensic investigators, and researchers, Trustwave SpiderLabs can point to over 20 years of industry leadership in vulnerability research and findings.
The team conducts 200,000+ hours of pen tests annually, discovers 30,000+ vulnerabilities annually, detects 1,000,000+ new malicious URLs monthly, and manages billions of threat intelligence records. Trustwave SpiderLabs is CREST-certified for both Penetration Testing and Simulated Targeted Attack & Response (STAR) Penetration Testing, proving we invest in training to ensure our teams keep up with the latest techniques.
Our pen testers take great satisfaction finding flaws that could lead to a catastrophe. In one recent pen test for a leading global bank, we tackled an app the bank had extensively tested in-house and found a business logic bug that could have allowed attackers to exfiltrate money. Think about how much value a finding like that delivers.
However, such findings don't just happen. They are the result of deep experience, expertise, and hard-earned intuition. That's the kind of message CISOs need to get across to help their leadership team understand the true value of pen testing.
To learn more, visit the penetration testing page on our website or contact us.