Access to transparent security testing — Why we made HackGATE™ available to everyone

Ensuring clear visibility and accountability in penetration testing is a prevailing challenge for security teams. We’ve experienced the struggle firsthand: traditional pentesting methods often lack transparency, detailed insights, and accurate reporting. As a result, organizations have difficulty determining whether their pentests are comprehensive enough and whether they are working with the right pentest provider or need to find a more reliable solution.

Driven by this frustration, we built HackGATE focusing on creating a purpose-built, vendor-agnostic solution teams can use no matter who their chosen pentest provider is.

The reason behind making HackGATE available as a standalone tool:

We aim to increase transparency in security testing for everyone and not limit HackGATE’s availability to Hackrate customers. It was important to us to make the solution available to as many security teams as possible, to be used as a complementary tool for their pentests.

Traditionally, companies have relied on reports delivered by their chosen pentest vendor at the end of each (outsourced) pentest. While these reports provide valuable insights, they are often limited in scope and lack the level of granularity and thoroughness teams would require after a pentest, to ensure everything went according to plan and testing was thorough.

By integrating advanced analytics and enabling access to in-depth, real-time information on pentester activity in one platform, HackGATE addresses this challenge in more than one way.

By providing a centralized platform that goes beyond basic reports, HackGATE empowers organizations to gain a deeper understanding of the pentest, including the testers’ ‘thought process’, methodology, and the rationale behind findings, as well as the ratio of automated scans vs. manual tactics employed during testing.

In this sense, HackGATE serves as a copilot for security managers, enabling them to conduct ‘trust but verify’ exercises against pentests while seamlessly tracking the progress and thoroughness of the processes.

As real-time monitoring becomes more accessible and commonplace in penetration testing, the focus will shift towards providing in-depth, expert-driven pentesting services. This creates a snowball effect, where providers must continuously elevate their offerings in terms of quality and transparency to stay competitive.

HackGATE offers uninterrupted visibility throughout the entire penetration testing process, maximizing the freedom and control organizations have over their security testing.

HackGATE facilitates better communication and collaboration in two ways: on one hand, between companies and their pentest vendors, and on the other hand, it facilitates better reporting from the security team towards company leadership.

Another use case of HackGATE involves overseeing internal pentest projects, especially in distributed organizations where security leaders oversee a large team across various locations and time zones. In these scenarios, security leaders can easily oversee all ongoing internal pentest team activities, observe how their teams are progressing with their tasks, and obtain an unambiguous overview of all engagements.‍

The availability of a vendor-agnostic monitoring solution is significant for several reasons. It democratizes access to transparent security testing, making it more accessible to a wide range of organizations, regardless of size or budget.

HackGATE’s indirect impact is promoting advancement within the security testing industry by pushing vendors to continuously improve their services. This approach also fosters a more collaborative security testing ecosystem, benefiting both organizations and pentest vendors, and improving the overall health of the security testing landscape.

For more information about the solution, check out HackGATE’s website.