How to Write an Effective Penetration Test Report

What Is an Effective Penetration Testing Report?

Following the recent trend of cyberattacks against IT infrastructure, service organizations have a steady rise in demand to conduct penetration testing on IT resources to ensure all vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated. Penetration testing is a technical cybersecurity procedure targeted at finding security flaws in a company’s internal and external networks, web applications, and systems. After a penetration test is completed, the testers must provide a penetration test report that documents the security issues identified during the assessment.

A penetration testing report is issued to an organization to present the risk associated with the security vulnerabilities identified in the infrastructure and provide remediation steps to fix the identified risk exposure. The test objective can be fulfilled based on the adequacy of the penetration testing report. Hence, a well-documented penetration testing report is as important as the penetration test itself. Below you can see the difference between the two types of penetration testing reports: