Penetration testing went from rare and occasional to standard practice as companies realized the cybersecurity risk. The biggest shift: vulnerabilities now turn into real attacks in minutes instead of weeks, forcing faster testing and fixes. Compliance requirements are pushing toward continuous testing instead of annual checkups.
Way back in the day, there wasn't enough people doing any proactive security testing in general. They just didn't know they needed to do it. And they would be surprised with breaches and whatnot. And over time they became more understanding of the cybersecurity risks, so they started to do more testing, which is, which is great. Then the testers were in extreme demand because everyone needed this type of testing. But one of the major things that I see happening this day and age is the speed. Speed from when a vulnerability is discovered to when an exploit actually gets created, that speed is tremendously accelerated. So for example, on Twitter X, I could see an exploit posted and it used to be days or weeks before you would see that being used by real world attackers at scale. Now it's minutes. So the speed of execution is much faster. What does that mean for a business? That means you just can't sit back. You need to test for these things as soon as possible to answer the question, am I vulnerable? Is this something that is breach worthy? You need to do that extremely fast and you need to change the way you proactively identify that with your offensive security program. One other change is the compliances. The compliances have basically stepped up and said, hey, we understand that there's liability here of data and we need to better protect it. So a lot of compliance and audit frameworks have adopted penetration testing as one of the best ways to identify your cybersecurity risk. They've even as very recently have adopted the continuous approach, meaning you can't just do it once a year, you need to be doing it more frequently. It needs to be a competency that you must master.
