As a seasoned consultant who has led and executed the full spectrum of offensive cybersecurity engagements across firms of varying scale, I have seen firsthand the diversity of approaches to client deliverables. No matter the environment whether a fast-growing startup, a Fortune 10 enterprise, or a government entity, the report is the everlasting artifact. It is the tangible output that shapes decision making, directs investment, and often defines the client’s perception of value.
If you’re in the industry, you’ve heard the adage or read it in the fine print of a legal document; Penetration testing is a point-in-time exercise. The tester is constrained by the organization’s security posture in that moment. True value, however, is not only in surfacing the most critical vulnerabilities, but in equipping stakeholders with a holistic, strategic understanding of their security posture. The role of the engagement and hence the consultant, extends beyond identification of weaknesses. It is about enabling clients to contextualize risks, anticipate patterns, and strengthen resilience over time.
Most security firms deliver against a common baseline; the mechanics are widely known and easily referenced in sample reports. What is less common, and what truly differentiates impactful practitioners, are the insights layered beyond that baseline. In this article, I provide two graphical additions that deliver disproportionate impact for minimal additional effort. Both of which cover elements often overlooked yet essential to elevating the client’s perspective.
These enhancements do demand more from the consultant: technical depth, situational judgment, and the ability to translate complexity into clarity for executive stakeholders. This is just one part of the standard to which I hold myself and to what I expect from my team.
Ultimately, the strategic goal of any offensive security service is clear: to provide clients with a holistic, deeply informed perspective of their security posture. If it’s a application, a critical asset, or the enterprise as a whole, empowering leadership to act with confidence.
Most firms include bar charts that segment findings by severity, category, or related dimensions. These visualizations are useful and should remain part of any report. However, they are often only partially consumed. In practice, executives and technical stakeholders alike tend to focus immediately on the red, the critical vulnerabilities such as injection flaws or similarly high impact issues. This focus is understandable: these risks are often the most urgent to remediate, frequently mandated by internal policy, and carry the greatest potential exposure.
The result is that lower severity issues, informational or low level findings not only rarely influence decision making but commonly are not resolved for multiple iterations. Their presence in standard severity charts often adds little value, occupying space without changing outcomes.
Yet this does not mean visual reporting should stop at severity distributions. Far from it. There are a range of additional graphics that can elevate the strategic utility of a report. Properly designed, these visuals can surface patterns, highlight systemic weaknesses, and speak directly to the priorities of both executive leadership and technical teams.
In the following section, I will illustrate two examples of such graphics. These are simple to produce, but allow the decision makers to instantly digest the information, resulting in far more impactful in shaping organizational understanding and action.
Remediation Effort
In most penetration test reports, remediation guidance ranges from a few sentences of general advice, to tailored instructions, to reference documentation, or even fully developed mitigation plans. While these are important, they are often consumed unevenly across different audiences. A more strategic addition is a visualization that conveys remediation effort for each finding in an instantly digestible format, allowing executives and technical teams alike to prioritize not only by risk, but by the resources required to resolve issues.
Before exploring visualization approaches, it is important to define what “remediation effort” encompasses. At its core, remediation effort represents a composite assessment across several critical factors:
- Depth – Is the issue a simple misconfiguration, a missing sanitization library, or a systemic logic flaw?
- Personnel – Can the point-of-contact team address it directly, or will it require a broader audit, cross-departmental collaboration, or even legal involvement?
- Budget – Is the fix a straightforward code change or policy update, or does it demand investment in new personnel, vendors, frameworks, or tools?
- Time – What is the realistic window from ticket creation to closure—half a day, a week, or an undefined timeline?
- Strategy – Will resolving this materially harden the overall security posture or is it just a temporary fix? If left unresolved, will the risk expand over the short, medium, or long term?
- Operational Considerations – Does the issue represent a recurring gap that, without systemic policy or documentation changes, will repeatedly resurface (“whack-a-mole” risk)?
- Impact – To what extent does prompt remediation upgrade the organization’s overall security resilience?
Ultimately, weighing these factors requires expert judgment informed by experience, industry trends, organizational maturity, and the nature of the root issue. Translating that analysis into a clear, visual representation of remediation effort provides leadership with actionable clarity bridging the gap between technical risk and operational decision making.
The following is a preliminary example of how this concept can be operationalized:
Threat Model Context Graph
The threat model context graph provides a concise view of the level of technical expertise an attacker would require to exploit a given finding. For the purposes of this article, we can frame it within a set of straightforward categories:
- Unexperienced Attacker
- Experienced Attacker
- Insider Threat
- Specialized Team
- Corporate Espionage
- Nation State
By mapping findings against these contexts, executives gain an immediate and intuitive perspective on the target’s overall security posture. This approach goes beyond abstract mThe value of this perspective is significant. It reframes vulnerabilities not just as isolated technical issues, but as strategic exposures with real world adversaries in mind, equipping decision makers to prioritize resources and policies with far greater precision.trics like “likelihood” or “complexity,” which are often embedded in scoring systems such as CVSS but provide little strategic clarity. Instead, the context graph translates technical findings into actionable intelligence.
It enables direct, high-level questions that align with organizational priorities, such as:
- Why are so many findings exploitable by unexperienced attackers?
- Are insider threats adequately considered during our software development lifecycle?
- Is this asset attractive enough to competitors or nation states to justify heightened concern?
- How long might a specialized adversary, such as a criminal syndicate, have been positioned to exploit this gap?
The value of this perspective is significant. It reframes vulnerabilities not just as isolated technical issues, but as strategic exposures with real world adversaries in mind, equipping decision makers to prioritize resources and policies with far greater precision.
The following is a preliminary example of how this concept can be operationalized:
Conclusion
The two examples outlined here underscore the untapped value frequently missed in industry standard penetration tests. Rather than reducing the exercise to a checklist of vulnerabilities and exploits, these enhancements position it as an opportunity to provide a holistic view of an asset’s security posture at a specific point in time. They demand minimal additional effort to produce, yet deliver outsized impact for executive decision making.
Most importantly, they begin to close a fundamental gap in the current state of offensive security services. Because penetration test findings are inherently bound to the moment in which they are identified, the deliverables must likewise maximize their tangible value at the moment of delivery.
Opinions are my own and do not reflect any employer or client. Examples are composites; no client information is disclosed. Written on personal time and personal resources.