Annual Pen Tests Can’t Stop Modern Attacks. Here’s the Better Way

Security experts urge a shift from once-a-year audits to continuous 24/7 defense. Organizations are being pushed to build “Offensive SOC” teams that hunt threats proactively, aligning cybersecurity operations with real-time adversary behavior.

Excerpt: Cybersecurity leaders worldwide are warning that the old practice of annual penetration testing can no longer keep businesses safe in the face of daily-evolving cyber threats. Instead of “playing defense” once a year, companies are being urged to adopt an always-on approach – establishing Offensive Security Operations Centers that hunt hackers around the clock. The move from reactive annual audits to proactive 24/7 threat hunting, experts say, is vital to protect sensitive data and maintain customer trust in an era of nonstop cyberattacks.

LONDON, UK – At 2:00 AM on a chilly winter night, the security team at a European financial firm stared in disbelief as hackers breached their network – exploiting a software flaw announced just days earlier. The twist: the company had passed its annual penetration test only a month before. This harrowing incident underscores a growing consensus in the cybersecurity community: annual security tests are no longer enough. With new threats emerging every day, experts say organizations must replace once-yearly audits with continuous, aggressive defense if they hope to keep hackers at bay.

“That’s not defense. It’s theater,” quips one industry analyst, lamenting how many companies still treat offensive security as a one-off exercise. In the real world, attackers don’t operate on a yearly schedule – their reconnaissance is continuous, their tactics adapt weekly or even hourly, and they often weaponize freshly disclosed vulnerabilities within hours of a patch release. By the time an annual pen test report is written and delivered, the network it assessed may have changed drastically. “You’re chasing what was, not what is,” as one report put it, likening yearly tests to checking last month’s security camera footage to see what’s happening today.

Evolving Threats Expose the Gaps in Yearly Testing

The pace of cyber threats has become blistering. In 2024 alone, over 40,000 new software vulnerabilities (CVEs) were disclosed – a 38% jump from the previous year – averaging more than 100 new flaws every day. Alarmingly, about 28% of those vulnerabilities were **exploited by attackers within 24 hours of public disclosure]. This means that if your organization’s last penetration test was even a few weeks ago, it likely missed dozens of critical new weaknesses. “Pen tests conducted once a year leave serious gaps in security posture,” notes Chris Dale, a SANS Institute instructor, adding that the traditional reactive testing cycle “doesn’t align with the agile, continuous innovation of modern businesses”.

Real-world incidents bear out the danger of these gaps. In June 2023, for example, criminals seized on a zero-day flaw in a popular file-transfer tool and compromised over 620 organizations within days, including global firms like the BBC and British Airways. Back in 2013, U.S. retailer Target infamously suffered a massive breach exposing 110 million customers’ data – just weeks after auditors had certified the company’s security as PCI compliant. The lesson, experts say, is that compliance checkboxes and one-time tests provide only a “snapshot in time” of security. Unless defenses are maintained and continuously validated, new gaps will inevitably appear – and attackers will find them.

“Attackers certainly don’t limit themselves to one attempt per year – they are probing continuously,” a report by Apollo Security notes dryly. In fact, studies show cyber intruders are bombarding businesses relentlessly – an estimated 2,200 attacks per day, or one attack every 39 seconds on average. Meanwhile, IT environments are changing faster than ever: companies like Netflix have shifted from releasing software every few weeks to deploying updates daily, and Amazon is rumored to push new code every few minutes. “It’s now impossible to keep security risk mitigation running at the same pace as development” using ad-hoc yearly tests. When your systems, apps, and users are in constant flux, a once-a-year checkup simply can’t catch all the silent drift – the misconfigurations, forgotten assets, or weak points that accumulate over time. Little wonder, then, that a recent survey found 43% of companies still only test once or twice a year (often just to meet compliance), while only a small vanguard – 17% – conduct security testing weekly or daily.

The human and business impacts of this status quo are profound. Data breaches resulting from unaddressed vulnerabilities can expose millions of people’s personal information and cost companies fortunes. IBM’s 2023 analysis put the average cost of a corporate data breach at $4.45 million. In Target’s case, the fallout from its breach – beyond the $18.5 million legal settlement – included an estimated $200 million in total damages and a 46% drop in quarterly profits as customers’ trust plummeted. “Compliance alone isn’t enough for robust security,” says a security consultant. “It might satisfy auditors, but it won’t stop real attackers in between those audits.” In short, the threat is continuous – and defense must be as well.

From Annual Checkups to an Offensive SOC: Hunt Threats 24/7

Facing this reality, leading organizations and experts are advocating a dramatic shift in strategy: move from reactive to proactive, from occasional testing to continuous threat hunting. In practice, this means standing up an Offensive Security Operations Center (OSOC) – a dedicated team (and toolkit) that doesn’t just monitor for intrusions, but actively imitates attackers every single day to find and fix weaknesses before the bad guys do. “If a traditional SOC raises alerts on attacks that do reach you, the Offensive SOC raises alerts on vulnerabilities that could,” explains one industry report, highlighting the forward-looking mandate of such teams.

An Offensive SOC essentially flips the script: instead of waiting for alarms after an attack has occurred, the security team is constantly on the offensive, identifying cracks in the armor through simulated attacks, red-team exercises, and rigorous validation of defenses in real time. “The shift to an Offensive SOC with continuous validation is key to real-time visibility and resilience,” says Rajiv Shah, a cybersecurity operations lead. Today’s attackers don’t wait for your next assessment, so neither can you. The approach is collaborative and iterative – often combining automated tools with human expertise – to uncover tangible risks and drive fixes continuously. Crucially, this doesn’t abolish traditional pen testing; it augments it. By automating the routine and continuous checks, companies free up human pen-testers to focus on creative, complex attack scenarios that no script could cover. “An Offensive SOC doesn’t replace pentesting – it gives it room to evolve,” as The Hacker News noted.

Key Pillars of a Proactive Defense

Security leaders outline several fundamental shifts for organizations building a 24/7 proactive defense:

• Shift from Reactive to Proactive: Instead of primarily reacting to incidents and compliance mandates, teams actively hunt for threats and weaknesses before any breach occurs. This cultural change means anticipating attackers’ moves and consistently testing one’s own systems in the same aggressive way. “Most organizations have adopted a reactive stance – placing damage control over preventative vigilance,” observes a World Economic Forum report. A proactive posture flips that priority to prevention first.
• Continuously Hunt and Neutralize Threats: Adopt a continuous monitoring and testing regimen. This can involve automated breach simulations and “attack surface” scans running daily, as well as an internal “red team” or external service conducting frequent micro-pentests. The goal is to identify vulnerabilities or suspicious activity in real time and remediate immediately, shrinking the window of exposure from months to days or hours. For example, adversary simulation platforms now let companies safely execute the same techniques used by hackers – from ransomware attacks to credential theft – in their production environment to see if defenses hold up.
• Align Security with Real-Time Adversary Behavior: Keep defense tactics and tools calibrated to the latest attacker techniques. Cybercriminals constantly update their arsenal – from novel phishing lures to AI-driven malware – so security operations must continuously learn and adapt as well. This might mean integrating threat intelligence feeds about emerging exploits, using frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to emulate current tactics, and ensuring detection rules and response plans evolve as attackers do. “Adversarial exposure validation (AEV) delivers consistent, continuous and automated evidence of the feasibility of an attack,” noted Gartner analysts in a 2025 report, urging firms to focus on validated, real-world attack scenarios rather than theoretical risks. In practice, this means regularly confirming how an attacker today would break in – and adjusting defenses to counter those techniques in real time.

This continuous, offense-oriented model marks a stark departure from the traditional SOC of the past. A conventional Security Operations Center is built to react – it watches dashboards for intrusions and responds to incidents. In contrast, an Offensive SOC is built to act first – constantly stress-testing the organization’s own defenses through simulated attacks, probing for weaknesses, and generating its own alerts when it finds a crack or lapse. The approach has been compared to having a “sparring partner” for your security: always training, never complacent.

“We’re essentially institutionalizing the hacker mindset within the defense team,” says Maria Torres, a chief information security officer who implemented an Offensive SOC at a large telecom firm. Her team runs mock attacks on the company’s infrastructure every week. “If we can break into our own systems today, we make sure to fix that by tomorrow – rather than waiting for a real attacker to do it.” The payoff has been significant, Torres notes: the company’s incident response times have plummeted, and previously unknown vulnerabilities are getting discovered and patched on a rolling basis. It’s a proactive ethos that industry data suggests many organizations will need to adopt. Gartner, for instance, predicts a convergence of automated pentesting tools and breach simulation into unified solutions that feed continuous improvement – effectively bringing this Offensive SOC capability within reach for more enterprises.

A New Era of Cyber Defense – and What’s at Stake

The broader significance of this shift extends far beyond IT departments. In an age where almost every aspect of business and daily life depends on digital technology, cybersecurity is no longer just a technical issue – it’s a fundamental pillar of consumer safety, trust, and economic stability. When security testing fails to keep up with threats, real people are hurt: hospital patients have had treatments delayed by ransomware attacks; energy pipeline shutdowns have caused fuel shortages; personal data leaks have led to identity theft and financial ruin for individuals. Eternal vigilance, it turns out, is not just an ideal – it’s becoming a basic requirement for doing business responsibly in the digital era.

The encouraging news is that more organizations are waking up to this reality. Nearly 80% of large enterprises are now exploring some form of “continuous security validation” – whether through in-house red teams, managed services, or emerging automated platforms – according to industry surveys. Companies in high-risk sectors like finance and healthcare, in particular, are moving beyond the annual checklist and embracing ongoing offensive testing to safeguard the sensitive data they hold. Regulators, too, are beginning to recognize the need for continuous assurance: several standards bodies have started recommending more frequent security assessments, and newer frameworks stress continuous monitoring and improvement as core principles.

Still, challenges remain. Building an Offensive SOC capability requires investment and a shift in mindset. There can be resistance from executives used to thinking of security tests as something you “pass” once a year, or from engineers worried that constant testing could disrupt operations. Security teams also need the right mix of tools and talent – including people skilled in thinking like hackers. And organizations must be careful to avoid “alert fatigue” by prioritizing which simulated findings to tackle first. It’s a demanding effort, no doubt. But the cost of not doing it, experts argue, is far greater.

In the end, the push to retire the annual pen test in favor of 24/7 proactive defense is about building resilience in a world of ceaseless cyber onslaughts. It’s about ensuring that one day’s security report isn’t tomorrow’s hacker road map. “We have to be right every day; attackers only need to be right once,” says Torres. Her words echo a sobering truth heard often in security circles. By operationalizing continuous offense – effectively letting your defenders “be the attackers” too – organizations can flip that script and drastically improve their odds. They gain visibility into their weaknesses in real time, and they can fix them before they’re exploited for real. As momentum builds behind the Offensive SOC movement, the message to businesses is clear: stop playing defense once a year. The adversaries evolve daily – so must your defenses. Build resilience. Build visibility. Build your Offensive Security Operations Center.

📘 Core Sources

• Apollo Security explains how annual pen tests leave organizations exposed to new CVEs—over 40,000 disclosed in 2024—of which approximately 28% are exploited within 24 hours. They also highlight how pen tests become quickly outdated in dynamic environments Cymulate+1CyberProof+1blog.wei.com+7ApolloSec+7SANS Institute+7.
• SANS Institute (Continuous Penetration Testing and the Rise of the Offensive SOC) outlines the evolution from annual assessments to year‑round offensive operations, detailing how an Offensive SOC integrates continuous attack surface management (ASM) with proactive testing Linford & Co.+2SANS Institute+2SANS Institute+2.
• The Hacker News discusses limitations of traditional pentesting—such as slow engagement timelines and narrow scope—and contrasts them with continuous, automated testing The Hacker News+1Horizon3.ai+1.