Cost Metrics: Exploring Pen Testing as a Service

Chenxi Wang, Ph.D. Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 19, 2017

Why do security metrics matter?

I have always been interested in metrics, and in particular how sound metrics can help security and engineering leaders make better decisions that have to do with investment of money, time, and resources.

Here’s a metric-related question that every application security leader should be able to answer:

What value are we getting for the money that we have invested in the application security program?

One of the reasons this is a challenge is that there are many different options for a given application security control that a security or engineering leader may want to implement. For example, when it comes to application security testing, there are automated scanners, consultants, bug bounty, and crowdsourced pen testing. Each of the options has costs and benefits associated with it.

I recently became interested in understanding metrics to measure the efficacy of one’s application security program. I partnered with Cobalt on a specific study to investigate the Return on Investment for pen testing. More specifically, I wanted to understand the associated costs and benefits for Pen Testing as a Service (PTaaS), as compared to the more traditional method of pen testing — hiring a team of professional pen test consultants.

As part of this study, I interviewed many user organizations that are using Pen Testing as a Service (PTaaS), and compared their experience with traditional pen testing services. I found that the ROI of a PTaaS service is 96% higher than traditional pen testing, primarily due to increased accuracy, lower cost, and improved efficiency.

Let’s take a look at the numbers

Assuming 235 work days per year, average cost of a fully burdened security engineer is $167,000, and the number of vulnerabilities that a pen test may uncover for a typical application is somewhere between 20 and 30.

Cost Analysis

Based on a series of deep dive interviews with customers comparing their experiences with pen testing as a service to traditional pen testing, I found that on average, the price tag of pen testing as a service is 31% lower than that of traditional pen testing consultancies.

2. Cost Savings Benefits of Pen Testing as a Service Platform on Triage Time

In a pen testing as a service model, the pen testers and the client are able to reduce the number of time-consuming triage tasks that used to require many back and forth meetings and calls between security engineers and engineering (or between engineering and testers). On average, this helped organizations reduce triage time to approximately 20 minutes per vulnerability (compared to 89 minutes per vulnerability with traditional pen testing services). This translates to an average saving of approximately 29 hours per test, assuming that on average a test uncovers 20 to 30 vulnerabilities in the high or medium category. For a company that conducts semi-annual tests on a large application portfolio, the saving can be significant.

3. Cost Savings Benefits from Increased Test Depth and Coverage

80% of the companies that deployed traditional pen testing services reported shallow findings and limited test coverage by those testers. Many of these companies told me that, in order to augment the shallow tests, they ended up spending another 20–30 hours of in-house personnel time for further testing and validation. With pen testing as a service, customers reported an increased test depth and more extensive test coverage, which means non-trivial time saving on augmented testing by in-house staff. Director of Engineering of an enterprise software company said, “The pen test as a service team crafted some inventive attacks. One test involved abusing of the business logic in a way that none of us had seen before. It was educational even for my developers.”

4.Cost Savings Benefits from Decreased Management Overhead

With a pen test consultancy, sometimes the customer needs to do daily calls with the testers in order to keep on top of the progress. One of the interviewees, the InfoSec Officer for a financial technology company, said that “waiting for a daily call to occur and dealing with the added overhead of a call every day is challenging.” With pen testing as a service, managing the project and keeping up with the team simply involves responding to notifications from the platform and checking the, as soon as they occur. On average, the interviewees said they were spending 7.5 hours managing projects with traditional pen testers. With pen testing as a service, that number drops to 2.8 hours.

5. Cost Savings Benefits from Shortened Time to Results

With a traditional pen test consultancy, the testers conduct their tasks in a “blackbox” — the customer has little visibility to what is going on until he or she receives a pen test report that describes the findings. With pen testing as a service, the tests performed are documented in the platform. Security or development teams can log onto the platform and see real-time information of the on-going tests. Results of the tests are visible in the platform as soon as they become available — no need to wait for a final report. While pen testing as a service requires a bit longer in the beginning to set up and gather information, the time-to-first-result is shortened from a minimum of 2 weeks with a pen test consultancy to a day, or sometimes hours with pen testing as a service. On average, time-to-complete results is shortened from 3.1 weeks with the consultancies to 2.25 weeks with pen testing as a service. The biggest impact of reducing time to results is the reduced window of exposure for vulnerabilities.

In Conclusion

These findings were based on in-depth interviews with organizations that are using pen testing as a service. The companies I interviewed represent a wide swath of different industry segments, including SaaS, enterprise software, healthcare, and FinTech.

What do these findings mean for your organization? Consider conducting your own analysis to compare different application security options, determine the costs and benefits for your organization, and choose the right model to deliver the best return on investment.

The full research study report can be found here.