Manual Pentesting is more Effective than the Automated

No doubt that both methods, when it comes to performing Pentesting Infrastructure share the same purpose. There is also the need for compliance, in order to prove and make a point of how a company takes seriously their Privacy and Security.

Human Vs Machine. Where Human is the Manual way, and Machine is the Automated Way.

Automated tests do not require from the user a lot expertise in the field, it is faster, easier, and have some adequate level of reliability. Therefore False Positives are inevitable. Most Vulnerability Scanners rely on some of the tools that Security Researchers have created already. It uses a lot of default, smaller wordlists when it comes to the fuzzing part (Directory, Traversal, SQL, XSS etc..) a lot of ‘typical’ and integrated tools not requiring any configuration from the user.

It has fixed results every time, it knows how to do limited methods and techniques facing different type of hardware encountered from the default Recon process. It is definitely not reliable when it comes to critical issues such as exploiting CVEs that require more sophisticated ways that hackers know how to do, therefore it will fail testing such & Zero Day types.

It lacks the mindset of how a real hacker approaches the target, the human intelligence that an experienced bug bounty hunter or hacker has gained to discover ways to analyze better, think better, and can run multiple types of testing with more custom built tools in comparison to the Automated ones. And that’s just some aspects.

Manual Penetration Testing can also differ from one person / company to another based on how much of experience they have, and that shows from what they do and are focused on. There are methodologies to follow, that not every security researcher has the experience in this field as much as others. For Example Manually performing a WebApp test vs testing a Networking Device requires expertise in both fields, and the list goes on with ways a hacker can perform such tests better than others.

The Manual Test result can vary from test to test, giving an advantage of less false positives with more issues found every time it is done. Manual Penetration testing also depending on the security researcher allows finding Zero Days, allows writing your own exploit code for the vulnerability found on the spot, therefore making it more reliable when it comes to critical issues, especially when they take advantage of an exploit that have not been fixed yet by the Company affected.

In Penetration Testing, there are phases, starting from the Recon process then finding the vulnerability, exploiting, gaining access & post exploitation, which requires manual intervention for more effective & absolute results.

All it takes for a hacker is one and not two issues to gain complete access on the target.

These are some of the things that automated frameworks lack of and it is why you have to rely more on manual pentesting because attacks are becoming more sophisticated which are the cause of some of the biggest breaches until today.

When you believe that you have the best reliable equipment, and have the right people to configure it, spending a lot of budget on securing your infrastructure, are you confident if you face a targeted attack today will you be able to sustain it?

When you design a solution for your infrastructure, you create a budget for your Security Needs (Hardware, Software etc..) You must also consider adding the costs for testing all of your devices continuously.