Revolutionizing Penetration Testing with AI and Human Expertise
AI-enabled attackers are speeding up reconnaissance and attacks, while development teams ship faster than ever. Traditional penetration testing lacks the scale and coverage to keep pace with either.
This guide explains how the Synack PTaaS platform pairs the autonomous capabilities of Sara agentic AI with the expert analysis of 1,500+ security researchers on the Synack Red Team: a human-in-the-loop model for discovering, testing, validating and fixing vulnerabilities across your attack surface.
PDF, 7 pages. No form required.
What you will learn
Seven pages on pairing agentic AI with human expertise in penetration testing.
Why traditional testing falls short
How AI-enabled attackers and expanding attack surfaces outpace point-in-time pentests and vendor rotation.
How human-in-the-loop testing works
How Sara agentic AI and the Synack Red Team work together on one platform, from attack surface discovery to root cause reporting.
What the platform covers
The capabilities, asset types and integrations that turn testing results into reduced risk and compliance evidence.
Accelerating threats and expanding attack surfaces
AI-enabled attackers are dramatically increasing the velocity of reconnaissance and attacks. That puts pressure on security teams not only to find and remediate vulnerabilities, but also to understand their root causes and prevent them from recurring.
Traditional penetration testing falls short here. It lacks the scalability and comprehensive coverage needed to keep pace with dynamic development environments and an ever-expanding attack surface.
Changing that means moving test outcomes from simply finding vulnerabilities to understanding why they are being found.
of respondents agree that traditional pentesting does not offer a viable or affordable approach to adequately cover their attack surface.
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey, 2024
Rotate testers, not test vendors
Organizations often rotate penetration testing vendors to increase testing diversity, reduce familiarity bias and improve outcomes. The downside is that results usually arrive as PDFs, which makes it hard to integrate them into security systems, identify vulnerability trends and root causes, and reduce risk.
The Synack PTaaS platform offers the scale, tester diversity, visibility and infrastructure integration to get the most from every test, rotating testers rather than vendors.
How the platform works
Sara agentic AI and the human-led Synack Red Team work across every stage, from discovery to root cause reporting.
Attack surface discovery and analytics
Discover and maintain a current inventory of the attack surface, then analyze the data to make risk-based decisions.
Vulnerability discovery and testing
Perform on-demand autonomous or human-led discovery, triage and assessment of vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability management
Make sure vulnerabilities are not just found but remediated efficiently, with confirmation retesting.
Reporting and root cause analysis
Analyze results to identify trends and root causes.
Human-in-the-loop by design
Synack's PTaaS platform fuses the autonomous capabilities of Sara agentic AI with the expert human analysis of the Synack Red Team. This human-in-the-loop model is the cornerstone of the platform. Read more about how agentic AI works, from planning and tool use to the guardrails that keep testing in scope.
Sara agentic AI
Autonomous discovery, triage and testing that scale across diverse attack surfaces, with proof-based vulnerability validation to confirm exploitable risk. Learn more about Sara AI pentesting.
Synack Red Team
More than 1,500 elite, diverse security researchers bring expert human analysis and judgment, so testing keeps pace with AI-enabled attackers and rapidly changing environments. Learn more about the Synack Red Team.
Key capabilities and benefits
The Synack PTaaS platform brings these security functions together.
Penetration testing for risk reduction
On-demand, automated and incentive-based human-led discovery of vulnerabilities. The blend of AI and human expertise gives deep and broad coverage to reduce risk.
Penetration testing for compliance
Identify common and critical vulnerabilities, then provide proof-of-work reports for compliance audits across frameworks including PCI, HIPAA, SOC 2, FISMA, NIS2, DORA and GDPR.
Attack surface discovery and analysis
Gain an adversary's perspective of your attack surface through continuous discovery and an accurate inventory of targets.
Autonomous vulnerability risk analysis
Sara agentic AI provides proof-based vulnerability validation to confirm exploitable risk.
Vulnerability management
End-to-end management of findings from Synack pentesting, from discovery through remediation. Synack customers have seen mean time to remediate critical-severity vulnerabilities fall by 24 days.
Trend and root cause reporting
Analyze results to identify root causes and improve processes, preventing future vulnerabilities.
Testing scale and efficacy
Incentive-based vulnerability discovery typically leads to better results, because testers are paid for uncovering vulnerabilities, not just for searching for them.
Cloud migration and security
Skilled cloud researchers test for external misconfigurations and dynamic changes to your public and private assets. Learn more about cloud penetration testing.
Synack at a glance
The world's largest software, cybersecurity, financial, government and retail customers rely on Synack for testing at scale to reduce risk and ensure compliance.
Hours of human-led testing
Exploitable vulnerabilities discovered
Elite, diverse security researchers
Figures as published in the guide in September 2025.
What you can test, and where results go
Synack helps organizations test web applications, mobile applications, hosts, APIs, cloud environments and AI and LLM systems.
The Synack platform integrates with current security operations center (SOC) tools, workflows and processes. Using the Synack API, customers can bring PTaaS insights into tools including Jira, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, Splunk and Tenable.
Questions about the guide
What is human-in-the-loop PTaaS?+
Synack's PTaaS platform fuses the autonomous capabilities of Sara agentic AI with the expert human analysis of more than 1,500 security researchers on the Synack Red Team. This human-in-the-loop model is the cornerstone of the platform.
Why rotate testers instead of test vendors?+
Vendor rotation usually delivers results as PDFs, which makes it very difficult to integrate them into security systems, identify vulnerability trends and root causes, and reduce risk. The Synack PTaaS platform offers the scale and tester diversity to rotate testers, not vendors.
Which compliance frameworks does Synack testing support?+
Synack identifies common and critical vulnerabilities and provides proof-of-work reports for compliance audits across frameworks including PCI, HIPAA, SOC 2, FISMA, NIS2, DORA and GDPR.
Which tools does the Synack platform integrate with?+
Integrations include Jira, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, Splunk and Tenable, and customers can use the Synack API to bring PTaaS insights into their existing SOC tools, workflows and processes.
Get the full guide
Revolutionizing Penetration Testing with AI and Human Expertise. See how Sara agentic AI and the Synack Red Team work together on one platform, from attack surface discovery to root cause reporting. No form. No email required. Evaluating vendors? See what to ask AI pentesting vendors to prove.