The Vilkas Wire
What Makes a Good Penetration Test Report
Aug 25, 2025 · By Ben Rollin
The penetration test report is the most important deliverable you receive from a penetration testing engagement. It is the document you use to brief your board, justify security spend, and give your teams a roadmap for remediation. Yet not all reports are equal. Some are little more than scanner output with a logo slapped on the cover, while others provide clarity, insight, and action that drive real improvements in security posture.
If you are a CISO, the quality of the report you receive is the difference between being able to make informed, strategic decisions or simply adding another PDF to the compliance shelf. Here is how to evaluate whether your penetration test report delivers value or wastes time.
Hallmarks of High-Quality Reporting
Before diving into the details, it helps to see the contrast at a glance. If you are evaluating a penetration test report, these are some signs of quality, and the red flags of a weak, scan-and-stamp report:
| High-Quality Reports | Low-Value Reports |
|---|---|
| Clear executive summary that business leaders can understand | Dense jargon, no plain-language explanation of impact |
| Tailored to your environment, acknowledges strengths and weaknesses | Generic boilerplate that could apply to any client |
| Findings are prioritized with context and risk ratings | Flat list of issues with no prioritization |
| Shows realistic attack chains and business impact | Isolated, low-value vulnerabilities with no connection to the bigger picture |
| Actionable remediation steps, short/medium/long term guidance | Vague advice like "apply patches" or "fix config" |
| Appendices that add value when relevant (password analysis, detection evidence, artifacts) | Pages of fluff, endless screenshots, or raw scan dumps |
| Professional presentation: neat formatting, correct spelling, consistent severity ratings | Sloppy errors, inconsistent language, and even another client's name left in by mistake |
| Evidence of internal QA and peer review | No signs of review, inconsistent style, or inaccurate findings |
Clarity and Accessibility
The first mark of a strong report is whether it is easy to read. A good report should make sense to both executives and engineers. You should not need to wade through pages of acronyms or Google obscure terms to understand the presented risk. Clear explanations of findings in business language are key. If the report describes a vulnerability, it should also explain what that means for your business, whether that is exposure of sensitive data, disruption of operations, or a foothold into critical systems.
Professionalism matters. Proper grammar, correct spelling, and a neat, consistent layout show attention to detail. A sloppy report, riddled with errors, or chock full of formatting errors reflects poorly on the vendor. Conversely, a well-structured, straightforward report signals that quality is a priority.
Executive Summary That Informs Leadership
The executive summary is one of the most critical sections of any penetration test report. It may be the only section that your board or executive team reads. A good summary should answer the following clearly: How secure are we today? What does this mean for our business? Where should we focus our attention?
The summary should be no more than one or two pages and be written in plain language. Instead of talking about Kerberos tickets or union-based SQL injection, it should describe outcomes that matter to executives, such as access to HR records, the ability to manipulate financial systems, or the theft of intellectual property. It should provide a top-level view of the organization’s security posture, highlight the most impactful risks, and give a sense of the effort needed to remediate them. A strong executive summary is short, sharp, and designed to help leaders make decisions.
Substance Over Fluff
A penetration test report should never be judged by its page count. A good report avoids fluff. It does not include endless screenshots, raw scanner dumps, or generic filler content to pad length. Evidence should be included when it adds value, such as command output showing a compromised account or a redacted screenshot showing proof of sensitive data access. The report should not bury you in 100 pages of repetitive screenshots that make it harder to digest the findings.
A particularly bad sign is when you find another client’s name in the report, the result of careless copying and pasting. This not only shows a lack of internal quality control but should also make you question the integrity of the vendor altogether.
Clear Prioritization of Findings
One of the most essential things a report should provide is prioritization. Not all issues are equal, and the report should make that clear. Severity ratings such as Critical, High, Medium, Low, and Informational are helpful only when the reasoning behind them is well explained. You should be able to identify what needs immediate attention and what can wait quickly.
A high-quality report will also show how findings connect into attack chains and point out where disrupting the chain would have the most significant effect. For example, if three issues in combination allowed a tester to compromise your Active Directory environment, the report should highlight which one or two fixes would immediately break that chain. This gives you a practical roadmap for remediation when not everything can be fixed at once.
Business-Relevant Attack Scenarios
Beyond individual vulnerabilities, strong reports tell a story of how an attacker could exploit your environment. They show how minor issues, when chained together, lead to serious outcomes. For instance, a weak configuration combined with a reused password might lead to a server compromise, providing access to sensitive databases. By illustrating these scenarios, the report demonstrates why certain medium-risk issues matter far more than their label suggests.
Attack scenarios help you understand the real-world impact of vulnerabilities. They give context that raw vulnerability counts can never provide and demonstrate the value of penetration testing over simple automated scanning.
Actionable Remediation Guidance
Every finding should come with actionable remediation steps. "Patch the system" or "fix the configuration" is insufficient. Good reports provide vendor-neutral guidance on which your team can act. They often separate recommendations into short-term fixes that can be applied quickly, medium-term improvements that may require coordination, and long-term process changes that address the root cause.
For example, a weak password finding should not only say "change the password." It should also recommend strengthening the password policy, updating onboarding processes, and considering technical controls such as password filters. Actionable, practical advice is what turns a report into a roadmap.
Transparency of Scope and Methodology
A credible penetration test report is transparent about what was tested and how. It should clearly state the scope, including systems, applications, networks, and exclusions. It should also outline the methodology used to ensure the approach was thorough and repeatable. This separates an actual penetration test from a shallow scan. If the report does not tell you what was in scope, you cannot evaluate its completeness.
Report Appendices That Add Value
Appendices are often where a good report goes from adequate to excellent, but they must only be included when relevant and useful. Valuable appendices might consist of:
- Post-exploitation evidence that shows what the tester accessed after achieving Domain Admin, such as sensitive file shares, databases, protected networks, or administrative consoles.
- Domain password analysis, if password hashes were obtained through domain compromise, that helps you evaluate password strength, policy effectiveness, and user awareness.
- External footprint information, especially if the external test had few findings, showing what data an attacker could gather from public sources.
- Additional Active Directory insights, even if not a full AD security assessment, to highlight areas for hardening.
- Detection evidence showing which actions were caught by your security team or monitoring tools. As an aside, it's a great exercise for your security team to monitor alerts and send key events to the tester for inclusion in the report. This helps to ensure that "noisy" activities are caught in real time and for the security team to tighten up monitoring/alerting after the fact around activities that were not alerted on or blocked.
- Exploitation artifacts such as payloads or files left behind, with details on where they were placed and whether they were removed. This information can also be helpful for incident response exercises, further leveraging the value of the assessment.
- Listings of compromised accounts, or a clear statement of whether the entire domain was compromised.
- Notes on configuration changes made during testing, and confirmation that they were reverted.
These appendices demonstrate thoroughness, careful note-taking, and respect for your environment. When done poorly, they bloat the report with useless data. When done well, they provide extra layers of value for process improvement, awareness training, password policy improvements, incident response exercises, and internal QA of your detection capabilities.
Indicators of Quality Control
A quality penetration test report shows signs of internal review and quality assurance. Findings should be consistent in format and severity ratings. Terminology should be used the same way throughout. The report should highlight positives and negatives, acknowledging areas where security controls were effective (kudos where kudos are due!). Reports that undergo peer review before delivery stand out for their clarity and reliability.
Red Flags of a "Scan-and-Stamp" Report
Unfortunately, some reports are little more than scan-and-stamp jobs. Red flags include:
- Pages of raw scanner results with little or no added analysis.
- Generic text that could apply to any client, showing no tailoring to your environment.
- No explanation of business impact or prioritization.
- Copy-paste mistakes, such as another client’s name.
If your report looks like this, you are not receiving a true penetration test. You are paying for something you could have generated with an automated tool.
What CISOs Should Expect
At its best, a penetration test report is not just a compliance checkbox. It is a decision-making tool. It should help you confidently brief your executives, give your teams clear direction for remediation, and support your case for security investment. A strong report provides clarity to leadership, evidence to technical teams, and a roadmap that connects vulnerabilities to business risk. When done right, they can be used for real change, to enhance processes, and to test that current processes (both technical and policy-related) are functioning as intended.
If your current vendor is not delivering this level of quality, it may be time to re-evaluate. A penetration test should leave you with more than a PDF. It should leave you with insight, clarity, and confidence that you understand your risks and how to address them.
Want to ensure your next penetration test delivers a report with real value?
Vilkas Cybersecurity provides in-depth assessments and reports that provide clarity for leadership, evidence for technical teams, and a clear path for your organization to stronger security.
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