Sep 05, 2025The Hacker NewsPentesting / Security Operations

Pentesting remains one of the most effective ways to identify real-world security weaknesses before adversaries do. But as the threat landscape has evolved, the way we deliver pentest results hasn’t kept pace.

Most organizations still rely on traditional reporting methods—static PDFs, emailed documents, and spreadsheet-based tracking. The problem? These outdated workflows introduce delays, create inefficiencies, and undermine the value of the work.

Security teams need faster insights, tighter handoffs, and clearer paths to remediation. That’s where automated delivery comes in. Platforms like PlexTrac automate pentest finding delivery in real time through robust, rules-based workflows. (No waiting for the final report!)

The Static Delivery Problem in a Dynamic World

Delivering a pentest report solely as a static document might have made sense a decade ago, but today it’s a bottleneck. Findings are buried in long documents that don’t align with how teams operate day-to-day. After receiving the report, stakeholders must manually extract findings, create tickets in platforms like Jira or ServiceNow, and coordinate remediation tracking through disconnected workflows. By the time remediation begins, days or weeks may have passed since the issues were discovered.

Why Automation Matters Now

As organizations adopt Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and expand the frequency of offensive testing, the volume of findings rapidly grows. Without automation, teams struggle to keep up. Automating delivery helps cut through the noise and deliver results in real time for faster handoffs and visibility across the entire vulnerability lifecycle.

Benefits of automating pentest delivery include:

• Real-time actionability: Act on findings immediately, not after the report is finalized
• Faster response: Accelerate remediation, retesting and validation
• Standardized operations: Ensure every finding follows a consistent process
• Less manual work: Free teams to focus on strategic initiatives
• Improved focus: Keep teams focused on what matters

Service providers gain a competitive advantage by automating delivery and integrating directly into client workflows, making themselves an indispensable partner to drive client value.

For enterprises, it’s a fast track to operational maturity and a measurable reduction in mean time to remediation (MTTR).

5 Key Components of Automated Pentest Delivery

1. Centralized data ingestion: Start by consolidating all findings—manual and automated—into a single source of truth. This includes outputs from scanners (like Tenable, Qualys, Wiz, Snyk) as well as manual pentest findings. Without centralization, vulnerability management becomes a patchwork of disconnected tools and manual processes.
2. Automated real-time delivery: As findings are identified, they should be automatically routed to the right people and workflows without waiting for the full report. Predefined rulesets should trigger triage, ticketing, and tracking to allow remediation to begin while testing is still in progress.
3. Automated routing & ticketing: Standardize routing by defining rules based on severity, asset ownership, and exploitabilit…