In today’s complex cybersecurity landscape, two crucial pillars of defense are routinely kept siloed: Vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. All too often, this leads to inefficiencies and potential blind spots. But what if you could combine their strengths for a more robust security posture?
That’s precisely what the new integration between Qualys Vulnerability Management (VM) and Synack Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) delivers. This powerful partnership is designed to transform how organizations identify, prioritize and remediate security risks, ultimately leading to better security outcomes.
The Challenge: Maintaining Vigilance Between Traditional Penetration Test Assessments
Vulnerability scanning is a foundational element of any mature cybersecurity program, providing broad visibility into potential weaknesses across your IT environment. While the CVE catalog identifies known vulnerabilities, the Qualys Detection Score (QDS) provides actionable insights into the material risk of each detection. With billions of scans and six-sigma accuracy, Qualys ensures results are precise and reliable, minimizing false positives.
Even a single, accurate penetration test cannot capture changes in the environment that occur between assessments. This periodic approach can leave security teams blind to emerging threats, create gaps in coverage, slow remediation, and make it harder to maintain continuous security. Continuous monitoring is essential for proactively identifying and remediating threats, especially as the mean time to exploit continues to decrease.
The Solution: A Synergistic Approach
The Qualys and Synack integration offers the best of both worlds. It leverages the broad insights from Qualys’ automated scanning, and integrates them with Synack’s continuous PTaaS leveraging AI-assisted triage combined with deep, human-led security testing expertise, and validation.
Here’s what the solution offers:
- Contextualized Testing: Synack PTaaS uses context from Qualys scanning results, allowing its agentic AI-powered Synack Autonomous Red Agent (Sara) to triage and test vulnerabilities within your specific environment.
- Human-Led Validation: This AI-driven analysis is then combined with the expertise of the Synack Red Team (SRT), a vetted community of security researchers. This human-led analysis mimics real-world bad actor behavior, confirming exploitability and uncovering complex threats that automation might miss.
- Faster Remediation and Verification: Synack acts as an extension of your IT and security teams, providing detailed exploit analysis, actionable recommendations for remediation and crucial verification of successful patching.
- Continuous Security: Unlike yearly, compliance-driven penetration tests, this joint solution can run on-demand or daily, ensuring that security gaps are addressed proactively and continuously.
Key Benefits of the Integration:
This integrated approach offers many benefits, helping organizations to:
Relieve Team Burden: IT and security teams are freed from time-consuming exploit and patch verification tasks.
Example of Qualys VM Sourced Scan Results, Triaged by Synack AI, and Confirmed Exploitable by Synack
A More Secure Future
Synack, a leader in human-led and AI-powered PTaaS, has a proven track record of nearly 10 million hours of expert testing protecting critical assets globally. Qualys, a leading provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions, serves over 10,000 subscription customers worldwide. This collaboration brings together two industry powerhouses to deliver a truly impactful solution.
The best part? This powerful new integration is available at no additional charge to Synack PTaaS platform customers who have valid Qualys Vulnerability Management subscriptions.
Ready to enhance your security posture?
For more information on enabling this integration within your Synack platform, please consult the integration guide. You can also reach out to [email protected] with any questions. By bridging the gap between vulnerability scanning and penetration testing, Qualys and Synack are empowering organizations to proactively reduce risk, stay compliant, and defend against the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape.
Greg Copeland is Technical Alliances Director at Synack.
