Automated Penetration Testing

Automated penetration testing platforms continuously emulate real-world attackers against your assets, so you’re not limited to waiting for an annual red team or manual penetration test to understand your exposure. Instead of static vuln scan results, these tools chain misconfigurations, exploits, and attack paths to show how an attacker could move through your environment – and what to fix first.

Where traditional vulnerability scanners focus on breadth of detection, automated pen testing aims to validate exploitability and business impact. The best tools combine attack simulation, safe exploitation, and clear remediation guidance, integrated into your existing pipelines and workflows.

Automated pen testing vs Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)

BAS tools are primarily designed to validate whether specific controls are working as expected. For example, whether EDR and SIEM detections fired.

Automated penetration testing / Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART) goes a step further and focuses on whether an attacker can still achieve their objective (initial access, lateral movement, data exfiltration, domain dominance) even when some controls do fire. Modern platforms increasingly blend both approaches: BAS-style control validation inside end-to-end, goal-driven attack campaigns.

7 Common requirements in this category

Technical buyers typically look for:

1. Coverage & scope

External perimeter, web apps, APIs, cloud accounts, internal networks, and identity infrastructure, with the ability to target specific assets, environments (prod vs non-prod), and critical apps.

2. Attack realism & safety

Realistic TTPs, chaining of findings into end-to-end attack paths, and safety controls (rate limiting, “do no harm” safeguards, maintenance windows, blast radius control).

3. Automation & CI/CD integration

Scheduled and event-driven tests (e.g. new deploy, new internet-exposed asset), plus integrations with CI/CD, ticketing, and messaging tools.

4. Prioritization & remediation guidance

Clear explanation of attack paths (“from internet to domain admin via X, Y, Z”), exploit evidence, and ranked remediation steps mapped to owners and systems.

5. Authentication & identity awareness

Testing of authenticated user flows, multi-tenant apps, and role/permission boundaries using SSO/OIDC, service accounts, or test identities.

6. Governance, auditability & reporting

Executive-ready summaries, technical detail for engineers, and traceability over time (what was tested, when, and with what result), supporting regulatory and customer evidence.

7. Deployment & data handling

SaaS, private cloud, or on-prem options, with clear data residency, log retention, and handling of sensitive payloads such as credentials or test data.

With Cybermatch, Automated Penetration Testing tools are compared against these kinds of criteria so security teams can quickly see which platforms fit their stack, risk model, and operating constraints, before committing to a PoC.