What Is Pentesting?
Pentesting, or penetration testing, involves ethically breaching a system’s security to identify vulnerabilities. This process typically involves both human experts and automated programs that research, probe, and attack a network using various methods and channels. The goal is to see how deep pentesters can penetrate a network, ultimately aiming to achieve full administrative access, or “root.”
What About a Bug Bounty Program?
Bug bounty programs incentivize ethical hackers with monetary rewards for successfully discovering and reporting vulnerabilities. These programs allow organizations to access the ethical hacking and security researcher community to continuously improve their systems’ security posture. Bounties complement existing security controls and pentesting by exposing vulnerabilities that automated scanners might miss and incentivizing security researchers to emulate potential bad-actor exploits.
What Is the Difference Between Pentesting and Bug Bounties?
Bug bounty programs yield valuable results over time due to their stochastic model, making them a suitable choice for organizations seeking comprehensive, ongoing testing involving a diverse set of security researchers. The long-term value of this approach is evident in the lower average cost per discovered vulnerability, as seen with leading global companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
In contrast, community-driven pentests via PTaaS deliver immediate results through a select group of security researchers. These experts, compensated for their skill sets, follow specific checklists to ensure thorough testing. Organizations needing immediate results for compliance or stakeholder commitments often prefer pentests, especially for events like the release of a new product or a recent acquisition.
Bug Bounty vs. Pentest
Why Organizations Need Both
For comprehensive security testing of production applications, organizations should implement a wide-ranging bug bounty program and supplement it with targeted pentests for assurance.
