Articles tagged: Penetration Testing
21 articles on Penetration Testing from the Top Floor insights library.
2026-08-25
Does SOC 2 Require a Penetration Test?
Not by name. The Trust Services Criteria mention penetration testing once, inside a point of focus the AICPA says you are not required to address. The obligation comes from what CC4.1 and CC7.1 need as evidence, and from the buyers reading your report.
2026-08-23
Does DORA Require Threat-Led Penetration Testing?
Only if your competent authority tells you so. No financial entity opts into TLPT, and no vendor can tell you that you are in scope. What the designation actually turns on, and what to do while you wait to hear.
2026-08-23
What Goes in the Cybersecurity Section of a 510(k)?
FDA screens a 510(k) eSTAR within about 15 days and holds it if the cybersecurity section is missing attachments, before the review clock starts. The February 3, 2026 guidance says what belongs there: six document types, fourteen rows.
2026-08-23
Best Penetration Testing Firms for Startups: How to Compare
Startups are choosing among five kinds of provider, not five brands. What each archetype is good at, the four terms that decide whether the report survives enterprise review, and who should not hire us.
2026-08-23
How Long Does a Penetration Test Take?
The testing is days. The engagement is weeks. NIST's own methodology puts a whole phase before testing in which no testing happens, and that phase, plus the retest at the other end, is where your date actually goes.
2026-08-22
PCI Segmentation Testing: Who Needs It and How Often?
If you use segmentation to shrink PCI scope, you have to prove it works: at least every 12 months under Requirement 11.4.5, and every six months for service providers under 11.4.6. A failed test can void the scope reduction your entire compliance budget assumes.
2026-08-21
Red Team vs Penetration Test: Which Does Your Company Need?
A penetration test finds as many vulnerabilities as possible in a defined scope. A red team tests whether anyone notices an attack in progress. CISA's own red team went undetected for an entire assessment at a mature organization, which is the argument for building detection before you buy the exercise that measures it.
2026-08-20
Cloud Penetration Testing: What AWS, Azure, and GCP Allow
None of the three major providers require pre-approval to test your own resources, and all three prohibit denial-of-service testing. The harder question is scope: a network test pointed at cloud IP addresses misses the risks that are actually cloud risks.
2026-08-19
Internal vs External Penetration Testing: Do You Need Both?
PCI DSS answers the question for anyone handling card data: both, every 12 months. For everyone else the honest answer is conditional, and a cloud-only company often gets more from a cloud assessment than from a classic internal test.
2026-08-18
What Type of Penetration Test Do You Need?
Match the test to your attack surface, not to a vendor's menu of nine test types. Most first-time buyers need one or two, and the scoping call should tell you which before anyone quotes a number.
2026-08-16
Does HIPAA Require Penetration Testing?
The Security Rule never uses the words. It requires a risk analysis and a periodic evaluation, and a penetration test is the usual way to evidence the technical half of that evaluation. Your customers are the ones with the actual deadline.
2026-08-16
What Is a PCI ASV Scan, and What Happens If You Fail One?
An external scan by an Approved Scanning Vendor, tied to PCI DSS Requirement 11.3.2. A single finding can fail the whole scan, and failing is not the violation. Missing the quarter is.
2026-08-16
What Should a Security Consulting SOW Include?
Seven things a statement of work has to pin down before anyone signs. If the SOW cannot say what you receive and who produces it, you are not buying an outcome, you are buying hours.
2026-08-16
How to Choose a Penetration Testing Company
Four evidence points, in order: named testers' credentials, the manual-to-automated balance, a sanitized sample report, and whether the SOW names the people. Price is the fifth criterion, not the first.
2026-08-02
How Much Does a Penetration Test Cost in 2026?
Most web application and API tests land between $4,000 and $50,000, and anything under about $4,000 is a scan in disguise. Here are the honest ranges by engagement type, what drives the price, and how to read a quote.
2026-08-01
Is a Cheap Pentest Worth It?
The honest answer: below roughly $4,000 you are almost certainly buying an automated scan with a human logo on the cover. Here is what cheap tests skip, how auditors and enterprise customers react to scan-grade reports, and the narrow cases where a cheap scan is exactly the right buy.
2026-07-30
Penetration Test vs Vulnerability Scan: The Difference
A vulnerability scan is software listing known flaws; a penetration test is a human proving what an attacker can do with them. Here is how depth, cost, and deliverables differ, what PCI DSS 4.0.1 and SOC 2 actually require, and how to spot a scan being sold as a pen test.
2026-07-28
How Often Should You Do Penetration Testing?
At least annually plus after significant changes is the floor across every major framework. Here is the exact requirement for PCI DSS 4.0.1, SOC 2, HIPAA, and CMMC, what counts as a significant change, and when annual is not enough.
2026-07-26
What Is PTaaS? Penetration Testing as a Service, Explained
PTaaS wraps human-led penetration testing in a subscription platform: continuous scheduling, live dashboards, retests on demand. Here's what you gain, what you trade away, and how to tell a real program from a scanner with a dashboard.
2026-07-24
LLM Penetration Testing: An OWASP Top 10 Walkthrough
A standard web pentest will not find the ways an LLM feature leaks data or gets talked into doing something it shouldn't. Here is how we scope and run an LLM test against the OWASP Top 10, category by category.
2026-03-19
Penetration Testing: Beyond Checkbox Compliance
Automated scanners catch the low-hanging fruit, but real attackers chain business logic flaws, misconfigurations, and social engineering into full compromise. Here is how to scope, execute, and integrate penetration testing into your compliance program across SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and CMMC.