Pentests once a year? Nope. It's time to build an offensive SOC

Table of Contents

You wouldn’t run your blue team once a year, so why accept this substandard schedule for your offensive side?

Your cybersecurity teams are under intense pressure to be proactive and to find your network’s weaknesses before adversaries do. But in many organizations, offensive security is still treated as a one-time event: an annual pentest, a quarterly red team engagement, maybe an audit sprint before a compliance deadline.

That’s not defense. It’s a theater.

In the real world, adversaries don’t operate in bursts. Their recon is continuous, their tools and tactics are always evolving, and new vulnerabilities are often reverse-engineered into working exploits within hours of a patch release.

So, if your offensive validation isn’t just as dynamic, you’re not just lagging, you’re exposed.

It’s time to move beyond the once a year pentest.

It’s time to build an Offensive Security Operations Center.

Why annual pentesting falls short

Point-in-time penetration tests still serve a role, and are here to remain a compliance requirement. But they fall short in environments that change faster than they can be assessed. This is true for a number of reasons:

The scope is limited. Most enterprise pentests are scoped to avoid business disruption, but we all know that attackers don’t care about your scope, or unless they’re in stealth mode, disrupting your business.
Controls decay silently. Drift is constant. An EDR policy gets loosened. A SIEM rule breaks. And annual pentests are not built to catch these problems. The security control that “passed” in the test may very well fail when it really matters, two weeks later.
Access escalates quietly. In Active Directory environments, misconfigurations accumulate silently over time, nested groups, stale accounts, over-privileged service identities, and well-known privilege escalation paths are commonplace. These aren’t just theoretical risks; they’ve been actively leveraged for decades. Attackers don’t need zero-days to succeed. They rely on weak trust relationships, configuration drift, and a lack of visibility.
Timing lags. By the time a pentest report is delivered, your environment has already changed. You’re chasing what was, not what is. It’s like looking at last month’s video from your door camera to see what’s happening today.

However, this is not a call to abolish pentesting.

Quite the opposite, manual pentests bring human creativity, contextual awareness, and adversarial thinking that no automation can replicate.

But relying on them alone, especially when performed only once or twice a year, limits their impact.

By building an Offensive SOC and operationalizing continuous validation, organizations enable pentesters to focus on what they do best: uncover edge cases, bypass defenses creatively, and explore complex scenarios beyond the reach of automation.

In short: an Offensive SOC doesn’t replace pentesting, it gives it room to evolve.

Without continuous validation, a security posture becomes a snapshot, not a source of truth.

From point-in-time defense to persistent offense

The Offensive Security Operations Center (Offensive SOC) flips the model from a one-off pentest as part of a decidedly defensive SOC to a team continuously out-maneuvering adversaries by thinking and acting like an attacker, every single day. Instead of waiting for trouble to respond to, the Offensive SOC is collaborative, transparent, and built to uncover tangible risks and drive actual fixes, in real time.

Think of it this way: If a traditional SOC raises alerts on attacks that reach you, the Offensive SOC raises alerts on vulnerabilities that could.

And the tools that power it? It’s time to toss your outdated clipboards, and checklists, and power up Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) and Automated Penetration Testing solutions.

The core pillars of the offensive SOC

1. Continuously discovering what’s exposed

You can’t validate what you haven’t found. Your organization’s attack surface is rife with sprawling with cloud workloads, unmanaged assets, shadow IT, stale DNS records, and public S3 buckets. It’s time to accept that periodic scans just don’t cut it anymore.

Discovery must be persistent and continuous, just like an attacker would do.

2. Real-world attack simulation with BAS

Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) doesn’t guess. It simulates real-world TTPs mapped to industry-recognized frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK® across the kill chain.

BAS answers a series of practical yet high-stakes questions:

BAS is about controlled, safe, production-aware testing and executing the same techniques attackers use, against your actual controls without actually putting your data, bottom line, and reputation at risk. BAS will show you exactly what works, what fails, and where to best focus your efforts.

3. Exploit Chain Testing with Automated Pentesting

Sometimes individual vulnerabilities may not be harmful on their own. However, adversaries carefully chain multiple vulnerabilities and misconfigurations together to achieve their objectives. With Automated Penetration Testing, security teams can validate how a real compromise could unfold, step by step, end to end.

Automated Pentesting simulates an assumed breach from a domain-joined system, starting with access to a low-privileged or system-level user. From this foothold, it discovers and validates the shortest, stealthiest attack paths to critical assets, such as domain admin privileges, by chaining real techniques like credential theft, lateral movement, and privilege escalation.

Here’s an example:

This is just one scenario among thousands, but it mirrors the real tactics adversaries use to escalate their privileges inside your network.

4. Drift Detection and Posture Tracking

Security isn’t static. Rules change. Configurations shift. Controls fail quietly.