CyberTools®

The Future of Automated Pentesting

Feb 3, 2025

The Future of Automated Pentesting – A Veteran Tester’s Take (From Someone Who’s Been Here Before)

I’ve been automating tests since the days when Selenium was the hot new thing and “CI/CD” sounded like a disease.
I spent a decade building test frameworks for Jaguar Land Rover ECUs under ISO 26262 and A-SPICE, Defence secure comms systems, and satellite ground stations.
I know what good automation looks like. I also know what happens when you bolt security onto the end of the process and call it “DevSecOps”. So when people start talking about “The Future of Automated Pentesting”, I don’t get excited about the hype. I get flashbacks.
Because we’ve done this dance before.We Already Solved This Problem – In Safety-Critical Land, In automotive and defence, you don’t ship code with a critical vulnerability. Ever.
We achieved that not by running Burp once a month, but by making security checks as boring and repeatable as unit tests.

Requirements → traceable security test cases (DOORS, Polarion, you name it)
Every sprint → static analysis (Coverity, SonarQube), unit-level security tests, fuzzing in the build
Every merge → dynamic scans in non-prod (ZAP, custom Gauntlt chains)
Every release → full regression + compliance scan (still automated, still passing before sign-off)

That wasn’t “shift-left”. That was just engineering.Fast-forward to 2025 and the web/app world is finally catching up.
And honestly? It’s beautiful to watch.Where We Are Right Now (November 2025)The tools have finally matured to the point where I can say – without laughing – that automated pentesting in CI/CD is not only possible, it’s better than most human pentests I’ve paid for.My current “dream pipeline” (the one I’m rolling out for clients right now):

yaml

on: push/pull_request
jobs:
  security:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      
      # SAST
      - name: Trivy filesystem scan
        run: trivy fs --scanners vuln,secret,misconfig .
      
      # SCA
      - name: OWASP Dependency-Check
        run: dependency-check.sh --project "${{ github.repository }}" --scan .
      
      # IaC security
      - name: Checkov
        run: checkov -d . --bc-api-key ${{ secrets.BC_KEY }}
      
      # Container security
      - name: Trivy image scan
        if: github.event_name == 'push'
        run: trivy image --severity HIGH,CRITICAL ${{ secrets.REGISTRY }}/app:latest
      
      # DAST – authenticated, fast, zero false positives
      - name: Nuclei authenticated scan
        run: |
          nuclei -u https://staging.example.com \
                 -H "Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.STAGING_TOKEN }}" \
                 -t ~/nuclei-templates/ \
                 -severity high,critical \
                 -concurrency 200
      
      # Break the build on anything real
      - name: Fail on critical/high
        if: failure()
        run

Total runtime: ~4 minutes.
Cost: £0 (self-hosted runners + free tools).
Findings: consistently better than the £25k “annual pentest” reports I used to get.The Real Revolution Isn’t the Tools – It’s the Mindset. The biggest change I’ve seen in 2024–2025 isn’t Nuclei, or Semgrep, or Trivy.
It’s that developers finally stopped treating security as “someone else’s problem”.When a junior dev now says “my Nuclei scan failed – fixing the XSS before I merge”, I get genuine goosebumps.
That’s the same feeling I had in 2015 when a developer fixed a buffer overflow before coffee because the MISRA checker complained.We’re finally treating security bugs like any other bug.

Where It’s Going Next (2026–2030)

AI-assisted template generation
I’m already seeing early versions where you feed Nuclei a Postman collection + OpenAPI spec and it writes 200 custom templates automatically. Terrifying and brilliant.
Feedback loops that actually work
Tools like Keep from ProjectDiscovery that watch your exploits and auto-generate new Nuclei templates when you find something novel.
“Pentest as Code” becoming literal
Your security tests live in the same repo, versioned with the code they’re testing. No more “we found this in last year’s pentest”.
Compliance as a byproduct
SOC2, ISO 27001, DORA – all becoming “oh yeah the pipeline already proves that”.

The One Thing That Still Keeps Me AwakeFalse positives are mostly solved.
False negatives? Still real.No automated system will ever find the clever business-logic bypass or the multi-step authentication flaw that requires actual human creativity.
But here’s the thing: those repented for <5% of the vulnerabilities that actually get exploited in the wild.The other 95%? SQLi, XSS, exposed secrets, misconfigured S3 buckets, outdated Log4j…
All caught, automatically, before breakfast.Final Verdict. I’ve lived through the automation revolution once already in safety-critical systems.
We’re now living through it again in security and this time it’s faster, cheaper, and (whisper it) actually working.The future of automated pentesting isn’t “replacing pentesters”.
It’s making the 95% of boring, exploitable vulnerabilities disappear so that the few remaining pentesters (like me) can focus on the fun stuff. If you’re still doing manual pentests once a year and calling it secure… welcome to 2015.The rest of us are in 2025. And it’s glorious.– Nick Thorpe
Ex-automotive/defence test automation dinosaur
Current Lead Technical Security Tester
Professional nuisance at conferences when someone says “automation can’t replace real pentesting” November 20, 2025

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