Your pentest found nothing. Here’s what to do next.

For security leaders, a pentest report—especially a clean one—is more than a sign of health. It’s a strategic signal. In a mature threat exposure management program, no findings don’t mean no risk—they mark an opportunity to calibrate your defenses, validate your scope, and plan your next move.

After a pentest is complete, the team compiles a report with their findings, some steps to reproduce the issues, and recommendations to remediate the identified issues. The report is the final word on the pentest assessment, and the easiest way to review what the pentesters thought about the assets you put in scope. 

A clean report isn’t a green light to relax; it’s a vital data point in your Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) cycle. It tells you your existing controls held under test conditions—but it also prompts you to ask: Did we test the right things, the right way? What’s next in our validation strategy?

The report is more than a vulnerability to-do list, though. There are compliance uses, training applications, and opportunities to celebrate—even if your pentest engagement turns up nothing.

What are the main uses for the report?

Regardless of the type of pentest you conducted, the most obvious benefit is that list of vulnerabilities and remediation guidance for each. Each finding gives you some concrete areas for improvement, and research topics for accomplishing those improvements. In other words, your report gives you a route to securing your scope.

The other main reason an organization gets a pentest is regulatory compliance. Some compliance frameworks simply require that pentesting gets done, while others require specific types of testing for the audit.

For example, the Payment Card Industry Digital Security Standard (PCI DSS) requires segmentation between credit card storage environments and the main network. The end result is a report that your team can hand to an auditor, which tells you how close to compliance you actually are.

What else can you do with a pentest report?

Even though you have the report in hand, and the remediations underway, don’t file the report away just yet. You also have some extremely useful data on hand: Vulnerabilities don’t necessarily emerge from thin air, and any trends your pentesters identified could prove useful in other ways. 

1. Spot trends and opportunities for improvement

If your in-scope assets all have similar findings, or the same findings are cropping up across multiple pentests, this represents a trend. Which usually means there’s a root cause. A lot of unpatched and outdated software components, for instance, may well mean that there’s an issue with your patch management process. 

You could patch each instance of the vulnerable software, but you’re just going to find new ones again later, because modern tech stacks use a lot of software. So, try to get ahead of the trend instead: make an asset inventory, sign up for update notifications, automate as much of the patching as you can. 

2. Plan targeted training

The most practical example is this: After an electronic social engineering pentest with a phishing campaign, you may end up with a handful of targets who fell for the phish. They shouldn’t be punished, but they should be enabled with better training on how to recognize and report suspicious emails. 

But don’t stop there. Forward-looking organizations combine pentest findings with skills benchmarking to map capability gaps, role readiness, and team strengths. Use upskilling platforms and cyber skills labs to validate not just if someone trained—but whether they can apply those skills in real-world scenarios. 

The Proofs of Concept included in the report also provide your team with a training opportunity to see your assets from a new perspective. Going through the pentester’s steps is like putting yourself in an attacker’s shoes, and it gives you and your teams a chance to spot similar vulnerabilities in your future work. 

3. Celebrate team wins

Any positive observations that your pentest team reported are a cause for celebration, because now you have clear indications of strengths on your teams. 

If your pentest reveals strong access controls, ths means your team did a great job implementing the access control model. This is a repeatable skill you can scale across teams—and a perfect candidate for dynamic benchmarking. Validate that success, map it across roles, and replicate it through internal mentoring or structured labs. When strengths are documented, they become part of your long-term capability.

Make note of who’s strong in certain areas when creating project teams. Don’t forget to celebrate your wins. There will be vulnerabilities in the future, but for today, take a little victory lap.

3. Archive for a rainy day

After helping you prioritize your training budget and celebrate some wins, your pentest report also has value as an artifact of the pentest. 

Filed away in your archive, it provides a snapshot of what your app looked like and a specific point in time. Granted, this is through a lens of vulnerabilities, but it just may provide the answer to a question six to 12 months down the line.

Bear in mind, a pentest report is a tempting target for a malicious actor: The report is essentially a how-to guide on hacking your assets. Even if you remediate a vulnerability, the report still contains documented evidence of a weakness. So, make sure to keep it somewhere safe.

So, what to do with a zero-finding report?

Sometimes it happens: The pentesters work at it for the entire time frame, and are unable to turn up any exploitable vulnerabilities. You have a “clean” report with zero findings. This may mean one of a few things:

• Your scope was too broad. The pentesters had too much to test, and not enough time to test it in. This happens sometimes with time-boxed pentests with very large scopes. Automated testing helps, but any type of pentest requires some time to complete the testing.

• Your scope was too narrow. For example, if an application has Admin or Super-Admin access, but the pentesters are only able to test low-privileged accounts, there may be vulnerabilities at higher levels that they simply can’t get to.

• Your scope was mature. Your team of pentesters conducted thorough testing, and found no vulnerabilities during the assessment timeframe. It doesn’t necessarily mean your app is secure forever, but it is often a good sign.

At the end of a pentest, you may need to ask your pentest team for more information about the types of tests they completed, any testing they were able to do, and whether it’s worth running another test with a broader or narrower scope. This is an opportunity to make sure your pentest program is calibrated correctly. 

This is also a win you can celebrate with your teams. It signifies a strong foundation for future development work on your application. While you may not have any vulnerabilities to fix today, the team may identify some trends to keep an eye on, or trends to continue improving as time goes by. 

What’s next?

A clean pentest is worth celebrating—but don’t let it mark the end. Let it mark a turning point. Now is the time to revalidate scope, expand testing with purple team simulations, and benchmark your team's readiness across the attack surface. 

With the right tools skills benchmarking platform, security leaders can turn today’s clean report into tomorrow’s strategic advantage.

🎯 Run a purple team simulation today