Why All Pen-Testing Services Suck! Find out before you compare vendors

As we close out the **"Why All AppSec Products Suck"** series, we dive into the **manual side of application security**—pen testing. While pen tests offer powerful, human-driven insight into vulnerabilities that automated tools miss, they come with serious limitations you need to consider before relying on them.

If you’re evaluating security testing services, this episode gives a practical, candid breakdown of when and how pen testing works best—and when it doesn’t.

🔍 **What you'll learn in this episode:**
- The true cost and limitations of traditional pen testing
- Why pen tests aren’t practical for modern CI/CD pipelines
- How human testing uncovers business logic vulnerabilities that tools can’t
- Why pen testing works best as a **complement**, not a standalone solution
- How to combine automation + manual review for the best results

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⏱️ **Chapters:**
1. 00:00 – Series wrap-up & moving beyond products
2. 01:05 – What is pen testing and how does it work?
3. 02:35 – Why pen testing sucks: high cost, slow cadence
4. 04:14 – It doesn’t scale: limited coverage in large orgs
5. 05:20 – Why pen testing rocks: business logic flaws
6. 06:25 – The human edge: context, intuition, no false positives
7. 07:25 – When to use it: mission-critical apps only
8. 08:10 – Final thoughts and next series teaser

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📚 **This episode is part of a comprehensive series**, where we cover each category of App Sec products:
* SAST: Static Application Security Testing
* DAST: Dynamic Application Security Testing
* IAST: Interactive Application Security Testing
* SCA: Software Composition Analysis
* WAF: Web Application Firewall
* RASP: Runtime Application Self-Protection (Next-Gen WAF)
* Manual Pen-Testing of Applications
(SAST vs DAST vs IAST vs SCA vs WAF vs RASP vs Pen-Testing)

🎞️ **Watch the full playlist**:
[AppSec Product Comparison Series](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLr15vRqvmtdW-LxrY_fFGNV8ub4_d_Qoc)

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🌐 **For More Security Insights:**
- Website: https://danondev.com
- Twitter: @Dan_On_Dev
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- Facebook: @danondev