Why We Built TurboPentest: A Pentester's Perspective

My name is Michel Chamberland. I hold the CISSP, OSCP, OSCE, CEH, GIAC, and CCSK certifications, and I have spent more than 15 years running IntegSec, a penetration testing firm serving fintech, healthcare, and SaaS clients across North America.

I have personally conducted hundreds of penetration tests. I have led teams that conducted thousands more. And after all that experience, I built TurboPentest to automate what we do - not because pentesting should be replaced by AI, but because the way pentesting is delivered needs to fundamentally change.

The Problem We Kept Seeing

Every SaaS company needs a pentest. Their customers demand it. Their compliance frameworks require it. Their insurance providers ask for it. And yet, the vast majority of companies either cannot get one or cannot get one often enough.

Here is why:

Manual pentests take weeks. A typical engagement starts with scoping calls, scheduling, legal paperwork, and environment setup. The actual testing takes 3-7 days for a skilled pentester. Then there is report writing, quality review, and delivery. From first contact to final report, you are looking at 2-4 weeks minimum.

Manual pentests cost thousands. A professional pentest for a web application runs $5,000-$15,000 for a straightforward engagement. Complex applications, APIs, and multi-domain environments push that to $20,000-$30,000+. For a startup trying to close an enterprise deal that requires a pentest, this is a significant and unexpected expense.

Demand far outstrips supply. There simply are not enough qualified pentesters to serve every organization that needs testing. The cybersecurity skills gap is well documented, and penetration testing requires some of the deepest expertise in the field. Clients routinely wait weeks just to get on our calendar.

The result is predictable: most companies pentest once a year (if that), treat it as a compliance checkbox, and remain exposed for the other 364 days.

The Insight That Started Everything

After years of running engagements, a pattern became impossible to ignore: our pentesters all use the same tools and follow the same methodology.

Not roughly the same - literally the same. We run Nmap for port discovery. We run ZAP and Nuclei for dynamic testing. We use Nikto for web server checks, FFUF for directory fuzzing, TestSSL for encryption analysis, Subfinder and HTTPX for reconnaissance. When clients give us source access, we add Semgrep, Trivy, and Gitleaks.

The tool selection is not random. It has been refined over years of practice to cover the full OWASP Top 10 and common vulnerability classes. Every tool earns its place in the pipeline by consistently finding things that other tools miss.

Every tool in the pipeline is one our pentesters use on real engagements.

The methodology is equally standardized. We start with reconnaissance, move to active testing, and finish with analysis and reporting. Findings are validated, deduplicated, correlated across tools, prioritized by severity, and documented with remediation guidance.

If the tools are the same and the methodology is the same, the question became: what is the part that requires a human?

Where AI Enters the Picture

The answer is analysis. The hardest part of a pentest is not running the tools - it is making sense of the output. A single engagement generates thousands of data points across a dozen tools. A junior pentester might report every finding at face value. A senior pentester knows which findings are real, which are false positives, which ones correlate to create a bigger risk, and what the client should fix first.

That analytical layer is what separates a vulnerability assessment from a penetration test. And it is exactly what we built Shannon AI to replicate.

Shannon AI is our correlation and validation engine - named after Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. It takes the raw output from all tools in the pipeline and performs the analysis that a senior pentester does:

• Deduplication - the same vulnerability reported by ZAP and Nuclei becomes one finding, not two
• Correlation - a weak TLS configuration combined with an exposed admin panel gets elevated because the combination is worse than either finding alone
• False positive elimination - findings that do not hold up under cross-tool validation are removed
• Severity calibration - each finding is rated based on exploitability, impact, and context
• Remediation writing - specific, actionable fix instructions based on the target's technology stack

Shannon AI does not guess. It reasons across the full evidence set, the same way our best pentesters do.

What We Did Not Automate

It is worth noting what TurboPentest does not do. We did not try to automate the parts of pentesting that genuinely require human creativity:

• Custom business logic testing - understanding what your application is supposed to do and finding ways to misuse it
• Social engineering - phishing, pretexting, and physical security testing
• Advanced persistent threat simulation - multi-week engagements designed to test detection and response capabilities

These are areas where human pentesters provide unique value that AI cannot replicate today. TurboPentest covers the technical vulnerability assessment and analysis that makes up the core of most web application pentests - the 80% of the work that follows a repeatable methodology.

From Weeks to Hours, From Thousands to $99

The impact of automating our methodology is dramatic:

Time: What took our team 1-3 weeks now completes in hours. The 14 Phase 1 tools run in parallel (not sequentially like a human would), and Shannon AI's analysis runs immediately after.

Cost: At $99 per domain, organizations that could never justify a $10,000 engagement can now pentest every application they deploy. Startups closing enterprise deals do not have to choose between a pentest and their runway.

Frequency: When pentesting costs $99 instead of $10,000, you stop treating it as an annual checkbox. You run it after every major release, after every infrastructure change, whenever you need confidence in your security posture.

Consistency: Our best pentester on their best day produces excellent work. TurboPentest produces that same quality of work every single time, without variation.

The Future of Pentesting

I did not build TurboPentest to put pentesters out of work. I built it because the current model does not serve the market. There are millions of web applications that need security testing and thousands of pentesters available to test them. The math does not work.

Agentic AI pentesting closes that gap. It makes professional-grade security testing accessible to every organization, at a price point that enables continuous testing rather than annual checkups.

The companies that will benefit most are the ones that could never afford traditional pentesting in the first place - the early-stage startups, the small development shops, the SaaS companies that know they need security testing but cannot justify the cost. Those are the companies we built this for.

For organizations that need advanced testing - custom business logic, red team exercises, compliance-specific engagements - human pentesters remain essential. Many of our users run TurboPentest for continuous baseline testing and bring in human pentesters for specialized engagements. The two approaches complement each other.

Try TurboPentest today - the same tools and methodology we have used on thousands of real engagements, now available to everyone.