7MS #358: 4 Ways to Write a Better Pentest Report

7 Minute Security

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This week we're talking about everybody's favorite topic: REPORT WRITING! Yay! The peasants rejoice! In the last few months I've seen a lot of reports from other companies, and here are a few key problems I see with them:

1. Too long - overall these things are waaAAaAaaAayyyYYYYYYyyy too long. I see reports where the analyst has copied and pasted an entire Nessus report into the main report. Yikes. That makes these things weigh in at hundreds(!) of pages.
2. Too techie - these reports look like their written from one techie to another. Nothing wrong with that, really, however in many cases the key person that needs to "get it" is a manager or C-level position who needs to understand the risks in plain English.
3. No narrative - the reports are just a long laundry list of vulnerabilities without any context of how the pentest was conducted or which vulns should be fixed first.
4. Weak remediation - most of the findings are accompanied by whatever remediation instructions are provided by the vuln-scanner or other tool. We can do better than this!

How? Listen to today's episode :-).

Oh, and don't forget to come to the next 7MS User Group meeting on Monday, April 22! Details here!