The 2025 State of Pentesting Survey Report by Pentera paints a striking picture of a cybersecurity landscape under siege—and evolving fast. This isn’t only a story about defending digital borders; it’s a blueprint of how enterprises are transforming their approach to security, driven by automation, AI-based tools, and the unrelenting pressure of real-world threats.
Breaches Persist Despite Greater Security Stacks
Despite deploying increasingly complex security stacks, 67% of U.S. enterprises reported experiencing a breach prior to now 24 months. These weren’t minor incidents either—76% reported a direct impact on confidentiality, integrity, or availability of information, and 36% experienced unplanned downtime, while 28% faced financial losses.
The correlation is obvious: as stack complexity rises, so do the alerts—and the breaches. Enterprises using greater than 100 security tools experienced a median of three,074 weekly alerts, while those using between 76–100 tools faced 2,048 alerts per week
Yet this avalanche of information often overwhelms security teams, delaying response times and allowing real threats to slide through the cracks.
Cybersecurity Insurance Is Shaping Tech Adoption
Cyber insurers have grow to be unexpected drivers of cybersecurity innovation. A striking 59% of U.S. enterprises implemented recent security tools specifically on the request of their insurer, and 93% of CISOs reported that insurers influenced their security postures. In lots of cases, these recommendations went beyond compliance—they shaped tech strategy.
The Rise of Software-Based Pentesting
Manual pentesting isn’t any longer the default. Over 55% of organizations now depend on software-based pentesting inside their in-house programs, with one other 49% using third-party providers. In contrast, just 17% still rely solely on in-house manual testing.
This transition to automated adversarial testing reflects a broader trend: the necessity for scalable, repeatable, and real-time validation in an era of ever-evolving threats. These automated platforms simulate attacks starting from file-less malware to privilege escalation, enabling enterprises to evaluate their resilience constantly and without disruption.
Security Budgets Are Growing—Fast
Security isn’t getting cheaper, but organizations are prioritizing it anyway. The common annual pentesting budget is $187,000, accounting for 10.5% of total IT security spend. Larger enterprises (10,000+ employees) spend much more—a median of $216,000 annually.
In 2025, 50% of enterprises plan to extend their pentesting budgets, and 47.5% expect to grow their overall security spend. Only 10% anticipate a decrease in investment. These numbers highlight security’s rise from an operational necessity to a boardroom priority.
Security Testing Is Still Playing Catch-Up
Here’s a startling disconnect: 96% of enterprises report infrastructure changes at the very least quarterly, but only 30% conduct pentesting at that very same frequency. The result? Latest vulnerabilities slip through untested changes, expanding the attack surface with each software push or config update.
Only 13% of huge enterprises with over 10,000 employees conduct quarterly pentests. Meanwhile, nearly half still test just once per 12 months—a dangerous lag in today’s dynamic threat environment.
Risk Alignment Is Sharper Than Ever
Encouragingly, security leaders are focusing testing where breaches actually occur. Nearly 57% prioritize web-facing assets, followed by internal servers, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and IoT devices. This alignment reflects a growing awareness that attackers don’t discriminate—they exploit any available vulnerability across your entire attack surface.
APIs, particularly, have emerged as a high-priority goal, each for attackers and defenders. These interfaces are increasingly essential to business operations but often lack visibility and standard monitoring, making them ripe for exploitation.
Operationalizing Pentest Results
Pentest reports aren’t any longer being shelved. As a substitute, 62% of enterprises immediately transfer findings to IT for remediation prioritization, while 47% share results with senior management and 21% report on to their boards or regulators.
This shift toward motion reflects a deeper integration of pentesting into strategic risk management—not only compliance checkboxing. Security validation is becoming a part of the business conversation.
What’s Holding Back Even Faster Progress?
While the trendlines are positive, key inhibitors remain. The highest two barriers to more frequent pentesting are budget constraints (44%) and an absence of accessible pentesters (48%)—the latter reflecting a global shortfall of 4 million cybersecurity professionals, in line with the World Economic Forum.
Operational risk, equivalent to fear of outages during testing, stays a priority for 30% of CISOs.
From Compliance Obligation to Strategic Weapon
Pentesting has evolved far beyond its origins as a regulatory requirement. Today, it supports strategic initiatives, including M&A due diligence and executive-level decision-making. Nearly one-third of respondents now cite “executive mandate” and “preparing for M&A” as key reasons for conducting pentests.
This marks a fundamental transformation: from a reactive check-up to a proactive and continuous measure of cyber resilience.
Final Thoughts
The 2025 State of Pentesting Survey Report is greater than a standing update—it’s a wake-up call. As attack surfaces grow and threat actors grow to be more sophisticated, organizations can now not afford slow, manual, or siloed approaches to security testing. AI-powered, software-based pentesting is stepping in to shut that gap with speed, scale, and insight.
The organizations that thrive on this recent era might be those who treat security validation not only as a technical necessity, but as a strategic imperative.
For more insights, download the total 2025 State of Pentesting Survey Report from Pentera.
