What is Continuous Penetration Testing?
A definition, and how it applies in practice.
Continuous penetration testing is the practice of running offensive security testing on an ongoing schedule rather than as a periodic project, so that newly introduced weaknesses are found within days of shipping rather than at the next annual assessment.
In depth
Understanding Continuous Penetration Testing
The case for it is arithmetic. A team shipping weekly makes roughly fifty meaningful changes a year to a system tested once. Every weakness introduced the week after the test has around fifty weeks of exposure before anything looks for it.
It is a change of cadence, not of technique. The same classes of testing — reconnaissance, application and API testing, network testing, authorization testing — run repeatedly, with results tracked as a lifecycle rather than delivered as a document.
The practical consequence is that a fix can be retested immediately instead of waiting for the next engagement, so remediation closes as a loop. That closure record is often more useful to an auditor than the original finding.
In RedStrike
How RedStrike handles Continuous Penetration Testing
RedStrike runs scheduled scans across applications, APIs, networks, containers, mobile builds, and cloud accounts, correlating and de-duplicating findings across tools. Retest-to-closure is available on the Compliance plan and above, recording the full lifecycle of a finding rather than a snapshot of open issues.
See also
Related terms
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about Continuous Penetration Testing.
Does continuous testing replace an annual penetration test?
Not necessarily, and whether it can is your auditor's determination. It covers the automatable majority continuously, which is the part an annual test covers for one week. Deep business-logic abuse and creative chained attacks still benefit from a human — continuous coverage makes that engagement start from a much shorter list.
Will continuous testing affect production?
It depends on the profile you run. Light profiles are designed to be safe against production; intrusive profiles are normally pointed at staging. Scope and rules of engagement are recorded before any test runs, and that ordering is the control.
See Continuous Penetration Testing in practice
Run continuous, verified security testing across your applications, APIs, and cloud accounts.