Traditional Pentesting vs. AI-Assisted Pentesting: Pros, Cons & Use Cases

Offensive Security Academy is an educational blog series on offensive security tactics and techniques in the age of AI.

Key takeaways

• Traditional pen testing is struggling to keep up with AI-powered software developers and cyberattackers.

• Human-led pen testing is evolving to AI-led pen testing with human guidance.

• Human pen testers still needed to inject business logic and context.

• AI-led pen testing excels at rapid, consistent testing for a fraction of the cost, and it can identify novel AI attack methods humans cannot.

• XBOW is leading the AI-driven pen testing evolution, and can give you high-quality, validated testing results in one week.

Traditional vs. AI pen testing

Penetration testing, or pentesting, is evolving beyond its traditional, human-centric form. AI-driven pen testing is emerging as the next iteration of this powerful testing solution, but when considering human vs. AI penetration testing, note that humans still play an important role.

What is traditional penetration testing?

Penetration testing (or pentesting) is a long-standing and highly effective security testing method. To conduct this type of testing, human pen testers, or “ethical hackers,” think like cyberattackers and attempt to breach the various components of a computer system (network, applications, APIs, etc.) to find weaknesses before attackers do in order to put remediating controls in place.

This type of testing is so effective, it is a requirement in many cybersecurity regulations, including PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, and more.

Strengths of traditional pen testing

Pen testing has long been considered the gold standard in security testing. It’s hard to beat the seasoned security expert’s creativity, expertise, and understanding of business context and knowledge for testing the strengths and weaknesses of your security controls.

AI will alter pen testing in significant ways, but human pen testers remain critical for testing for and defending against things like social engineering attacks dependent on understanding the nuances of human behavior, or complex attack chains dependent on business context.

Weaknesses of traditional pen testing

Traditional, human-based pen testing is expensive, slow, inconsistent, only captures a point in time, and is unable to identify some new AI-based attack methods.  

Drawbacks to traditional penetration testing include:

• Cost and time: A traditional pen test can cost on average about $30,000 and take several months to complete. 

• No ability to identify new AI attacks: The humans conducting these tests can miss novel AI-assisted attack methods. For instance, XBOW’s AI-assisted pen testing solution recently discovered an unusual RCE vulnerability in TiTiler.

• Lack of continual testing: Traditional pen tests are one-off projects that only capture a point-in-time snapshot of a security status.

• Varying quality: The quality of traditional pen tests depends on the skill and expertise of the human doing the testing.

With software developers leveraging AI to crank out code at record speeds, and cyberattackers leveraging AI to spin up novel attacks at record speed, slow, cumbersome, human-focused testing methods will quickly be rendered obsolete. 

What is AI-augmented offensive security, or AI-driven pen testing?

AI pentesting is emerging as the solution for this type of testing in an AI-driven world. It is similar to manual pen testing, but AI plays a role in each step, from reconnaissance to reporting. With this AI boost, organizations can dramatically increase the scale and speed of their pen testing, while also decreasing the cost.

Strengths of AI-assisted pen testing

The benefits of AI in pentesting efficiency include:

• Speed and scale: The ability to rapidly conduct tests across a wide attack surface is the key advantage of AI in pen testing. AI-driven pen testing can conduct more tests faster than any human ever could. AI-assisted pen testing excels at rapidly completing tasks like gathering and correlating data, scanning for vulnerabilities, and generating reports. With AI, pen testing can quickly scale to cover large, complex environments in a way that would be challenging or impossible for traditional pen testers. 

• Continual and consistent testing: AI pen testing can be conducted continually and consistently— ensuring fast-moving environments are always analyzed and with the same quality level. 

• Lower cost and time commitment: All this speed and scale also comes with lower costs and time required due to less people, less manual tasks, and the lack of expensive bug bounty programs.

• Ability to identify novel AI attack methods: Using AI to counter AI-led cyberattacks offers another advantage, as there are emerging AI-led attacks that a human would not be able to identify, but AI can.

Weaknesses of AI-assisted pen testing

AI will always struggle to understand and apply business logic and context to testing results the way human testers can. Without human assistance, AI can’t yet apply business background or, in some cases, chain together complex vulnerabilities to highlight an attack path. In the end, AI can (not yet anyway) match the level of creativity humans bring to the table. 

Manual vs automated security testing

When comparing traditional penetration testing vs AI assisted penetration testing, what are differences? The table below highlights the differences at a glance.

AI-assisted pentesting comparison

Manual vs automated pentesting: When do you need AI?

Are there cases where AI isn’t needed, and traditional, manual penetration testing will suffice? Yes, there are some niche cases where traditional pen testing could be adequate on its own. But for most organizations, a combination of AI-driving pen testing with human testers is ideal.

When to use traditional pen testing

For small organizations with simple technology environments that don’t change frequently, a human pen test alone could make sense financially and time-wise. The cost and resources involved would likely be manageable, and a point-in-time test would suffice in this case.

When to use AI-driven pen testing

Any and all large, complex, fast-moving organizations need to add AI to their pen testing. Human-based pen testing simply can’t scale or test fast enough to keep up with these environments. The cost to test assets and systems across a distributed, multinational, DevOps, cloud-based enterprise would be extreme, and the results would be rendered outdated and obsolete almost immediately.

Penetration testing is a critical security measure, but is only feasible for most organizations today if AI is playing a role.

When to use human plus AI pen testing

Human testers plus AI-driven pen testing is the ideal scenario for organizations of every size and complexity. Humans will always need to guide the AI with business context, and AI will always outperform a human’s ability to test quickly and at scale. Human creativity plus AI’s speed is the future of pen testing, and cybersecurity.

See the power of AI-assisted pen testing in one week with XBOW

See what AI-assisted pen testing can find in your environment today. XBOW, the AI-driven pen testing solution that reached #1 on the global HackerOne leaderboard, gives you human-level testing at machine speeds.

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Start your XBOW pentest today.