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I'm trying to imagine being a customer for this kind of service. When would I be satisfied with a pen testing service? If I'm not familiar with pentesting meth

• SCHiM 6y ago
  I work as a professional pentester. This question is difficult for both sides. The business often gets in my way with budgets. I can spend it all on some strange behavior that I detect in the application. I like to spend my time like that. The more experience I get the more time I could spend, even on simple applications. The rabbit hole goes ever deeper. When am I satisfied that I delivered good work? When I find a number of high impact vulnerabilities. Doesn't mean there aren't still more to be found, like I said you could go on and on, but it does mean that I fixed some bad. Sadly I have a fixed budget, and sometimes I find nothing, those are bad days. In my experience customers are also satisfied with a report that contains few or no impactful findings. But an empty report is no guarantee that there really isn't anything to be found. It's difficult to balance the desire to dive deep and to provide broad coverage. I once got bit by that. I found and clearly documented no less than 3 absolutely critical issues (price adjustment in an e-commerce website). Felt pretty good about that test. Until, in production, someone else found an additional authentication bypass. Oops. I wasn't focused on that due the aforementioned input validation issues and got blinded by trying to find more of those. It's not easy.