How to Build a 90-Day Penetration Testing Remediation Program With Proof

Penetration testing (pen testing) simulates a cyberattack to identify system vulnerabilities, exposing potential attack vectors before actual incidents occur. Post-penetration testing remediation workflows transform pen test findings into a remediation program with clear ownership, timelines, and evidence that clients and auditors can trust.

Operationalize penetration testing remediation in 90 days

Turning your pen test findings into a 90-day remediation strategy turns raw IT metrics into measurable progress. It enforces accountability, aligns with business cycles, and delivers proof of risk reduction to clients and stakeholders.

📌Prerequisites:

• Final pen test report with severity ratings and evidence
• Asset and data classification to translate technical risk to business impact
• Named owners for remediation, validation, and change approvals
• Ticketing workspace and a shared evidence folder for results

Step #1: Standardize pen test reports and assign ownership

Penetration test results often come in multiple formats, varying severity ratings, inconsistent naming conventions, and sometimes overlapping findings. Standardizing your findings by assigning IDs, mapping to assets, and categorizing by CWE or risk creates clean documentation that you can base future remediation work on.

Recommended action plan:

1. Import all findings: Leverage an ITSM software to centrally store and track pen test results.
2. Assign a unique ID: Assigning a unique identifier to each surfaced vulnerability streamlines issue tracking from detection to validation.
3. Tag items: Indicate affected assets, vulnerability class, severity, and business impact.
4. Assign two roles per finding: Assign an owner to implement and coordinate the fix, and a verifier to confirm and document the resolution workflow.
5. Capture change windows and dependencies: This minimizes downtime conflicts and ensures fixes align with maintenance schedules.

Step #2: Build a 3-part, 90-day penetration testing remediation workflow

Pen tests can combine urgent vulnerabilities with low-risk issues, which can overwhelm remediation workflows and lead to missed deadlines or incomplete work. Leveraging a 90-day, wave-based approach organizes workflows, allowing technicians to prioritize issues and ensure that critical vulnerabilities are addressed early.

Recommended action plan:

1. Days 1 to 30: Address easily exploitable vulnerabilities that can be fixed quickly, such as missing patches, policy misconfigurations, weak credentials, or exposed admin portals.
2. Days 31 to 60: Remediate vulnerabilities that require complex code-level adjustments and cross-team coordination between developers, network engineers, and testers. Integrate testing during maintenance windows to manage its impact.
3. Days 61 to 90: Close low-risk items, implement configuration hardening, rotate credentials, and finalize your documentation.
4. Lock the plan to your team’s calendar: Set start and end dates for each wave, and align these dates with your organization’s release and management change cycles. Treat these dates as agreed commitments across teams and ensure they are visible to all stakeholders.

Step #3: Create a change checklist per penetration test finding

Crafting standardized checklists guides your vulnerability remediation strategy and changes made within live client environments. Doing this reduces the occurrence of partial fixes, missed dependencies, and the risk of introducing new vulnerabilities to client environments.

Recommended action plan:

1. Define proposed control change: Describe the changes needed to address identified vulnerabilities, such as patches, configuration updates, code fixes, or policy adjustments. Note any services, users, or systems affected.
2. Build a test plan: Replicate identified issues as found in pen tests, then define success criteria after a fix is applied.
3. Prepare a rollback checklist: Define the steps technicians need to take when a fix unintendedly breaks a system or degrades endpoint performance.
4. Attach evidence: Include both pre-fix and post-fix documentation from pen test results directly to its unique ID to support future validation steps. Capture the task owner, date, and test environment used for verification consistency.

Step #4: Prioritize clear risks uncovered by penetration testing stages

Proper vulnerability prioritization enables you to focus on high-risk vulnerabilities, allowing you to immediately close critical attack vectors. This minimizes your client’s exposure time, reduces the likelihood of compromise, and demonstrates decisiveness in addressing threats once they surface.

Recommended action plan:

1. Define “clear risk” items: Spot and prioritize vulnerabilities with public exploits, known CVEs, or straightforward attack methods. Prioritize findings, such as the following:
   • Weak or missing authentication controls
   • Insecure direct object references (IDORs)
   • Injection flaws (e.g., SQL, command, or LDAP)
   • Exposed administrative interfaces
   • Weak access control
2. Apply a minimum viable fix: Use minimal and targeted fixes that close vulnerabilities without causing significant system impact or changes. Avoid large redesigns, as the goal is rapid threat containment, not to overhaul stacks.
3. Document and schedule follow-ups: After closing the gaps, identify necessary improvements or redesigns required for long-term resilience. Schedule these as planned tasks in future remediation waves.

Step #5: Validate every implemented fix and capture evidence

Retesting each fix using the same method found during pen testing ensures that vulnerabilities are closed and won’t resurface. Additionally, evidence becomes your defensible record that risks are truly closed and not shifted elsewhere in the system.

Recommended action plan:

1. Recreate pen test conditions: Leverage the same tools, payloads, or requests that the original pen tests used to surface the vulnerability.
2. Execute the retest: Run the same attack simulation or exploit to verify the effectiveness of your fix. Observe system behavior to determine if indicators of compromise or vulnerabilities remain; their absence indicates that the vulnerability is closed.
3. Capture proof of validation: Save both before-and-after test evidence, such as console output, screenshots, or network traces, that demonstrate successful vulnerability remediation. Label and attach these artifacts to the finding’s unique ID within your tracker or evidence repository.
4. Document verification details: Document who verified the fix, validation date, and the tools used. Capture test notes or observations that can help explain the fix in detail.

Step #6: Capture exceptions in penetration testing remediation workflows

Some vulnerabilities can’t be closed within 90 days. Documenting these lapses as exceptions ensures that deferred items are accounted for. Keeping unremediated vulnerabilities tracked, owned, and reviewed until a permanent fix is available minimizes blind spots in client environments.

Recommended action plan:

1. Create an entry per exception: Assign an owner, capture the rationale behind the exception, temporary fix, and expiry date.
2. Review exceptions regularly: Hold a short review meeting or checklist run, preferably weekly, to confirm the following:

• • Verify if temporary fixes are still effective.
  • Conditions haven’t drifted to make remediation possible.
  • Expiry dates are updated or closed appropriately.

3. Disallow permanent exceptions: If a vulnerability can’t be remediated permanently, escalate it for a design review to plan system architecture or address business acceptance risk changes.

Step #7: Address web application vulnerabilities systematically

Web application vulnerabilities typically follow repeatable patterns; once you’ve seen an issue, you’ll likely find the same issue across multiple routes, modules, or applications. Systematically addressing these types of vulnerability through well-designed changes eliminates related issues in one go.

Recommended action plan:

1. Group similar findings: Categorize web-related findings by type, and identify where they occur repeatedly; for example, through shared APIs, templates, or middleware.
2. Define the common pattern: Understand the why behind the identified vulnerability. For instance, if multiple endpoints are vulnerable to SQL injection, the real issue may lie behind unvalidated query inputs or missing data layer sanitization.
3. Centralize fix distribution: Apply controls in shared code paths or through centralized components so that the fix deploys automatically across the entire environment.
4. Verify effectiveness and capture fixes: Document and retest fixes across affected endpoints or applications to confirm whether they have mitigated the entire class of vulnerabilities.

Step #8: Strengthen your pen testing roadmap by closing gaps

Aside from external exploits, attackers can bypass your defenses by leveraging insider threats, such as overprivileged accounts, exposed credentials, or weak configurations. Once an attacker gains access, this type of vulnerability enables them to perform lateral movement and acquire privileges to disable your defense.

Recommended action plan:

1. Enforce least privilege access: Review permissions for all affected users, service accounts, and systems identified in the pen test. Verify that all accounts and APIs have only the exact permissions required for their function.
2. Rotate and protect credentials: Immediately rotate any potentially exposed passwords, API keys, SSH keys, or tokens to ensure security. Migrate sensitive credentials into a secure vault and enforce strong authentication in systems, such as MFA for privileged accounts.
3. Harden baselines: Review system and application configurations against security baselines and apply consistent hardening templates across similar endpoints to eliminate configuration drift.
4. Enable logging and monitoring: Turn on logging for identity actions, privileged commands, and authentication attempts, and integrate these logs to detect anomalies.

Step #9: Conduct verification sweeps before closing pen test remediation

Over time, fixes can drift, updates might reintroduce vulnerabilities, or dependencies may shift unnoticed. Running a final verification sweep before your 90-day strategy ends ensures that every closed finding remains fixed.

Recommended action plan:

1. Retest all closed findings: Repeat the original testing steps, as stated in step 5, to confirm that each vulnerability remains fixed and the results match prior evidence.
2. Spot-check adjacent controls: Test related systems or controls that remediation work could have potentially impacted.
3. Capture metrics and outcomes: Record pass and fail rates, reopened findings, and document any new anomalies that surface.
4. Reopen or escalate as needed: Any issues found during the sweep should be logged immediately for follow-up. Use newly gathered insights to refine your hardening strategy for the next cycle.

Step #10: Publish evidence packets to support pen test remediation strategy

A monthly one-pager evidence packet serves as a client-facing proof of your penetration testing remediation workflows. It demonstrates what you’ve fixed, temporary gaps, and plans, without overwhelming stakeholders with complex spreadsheets and logs.

Recommended action plan:

• Summarize key metrics: Include counts of open and closed findings, risk burn-down trends, and any exceptions and reopened vulnerabilities.
• Link evidence to findings: Reference validation artifacts collected throughout remediation, ensuring every data point traces back to its unique ID for auditability.
• Include next month’s strategy: Outline what’s coming in the next remediation wave, such as verifications, design reviews, or hardening strategies.
• Maintain a consistent format: Keep packets easily readable by using the same format consistently. This makes your report repeatable, making it easy to generate and compare across quarters.

Sample automation touchpoint for penetration testing remediation

Automation supports pen testing remediation steps by speeding up workflows while maintaining consistency, accountability, and evidence across your 90-day cycle.

• Schedule nightly jobs to sync findings from trackers, update burn-down charts, and check exception expiration dates.
• Automatically flag missing validation artifacts or exceptions nearing due dates.
• Set weekly scripts to probe high-risk classes and confirm that fixes still hold.
• Send new test results and logs to centralized evidence repositories.

Leverage NinjaOne to automate pen testing roadmap procedures

NinjaOne streamlines penetration testing remediation workflows by automating evidence collection, tracking, and reporting across your 90-day strategy. Its tools automate validation, documentation, and vulnerability management, reducing manual technician effort without compromising your client’s security posture.

• Schedule tasks: Use policy-scheduled tasks to automate evidence collection, tag assets by finding ID, and attach monthly evidence packets to documentation. NinjaOne’s Scheduled Reports feature can automatically collect and distribute evidence across tenants.
• IT asset tagging: Track and organize endpoints across client environments, linking each asset to its associated findings from pen test reports. This helps you tie findings to real, traceable endpoints for future verification work.
• Vulnerability management: NinjaOne’s vulnerability management service surfaces vulnerabilities along with their CVE and CVSS scores to support priotitization. Patch automation can be configured to assist with remediation where applicable.
• Documentation tool: NinjaOne Documentation enables you to create custom remediation runbooks and store per-tenant evidence in a centralized knowledge base. This ensures consistent workflows and facilitates easier knowledge transfer among technicians.

Build a 90-day pen testing roadmap to remediate risks

Maximize penetration tests by taking action on findings in a structured manner that preserves changes with evidence. By standardizing your findings, planning in waves, consistently validating fixes, documenting exceptions, and transparent reporting, you can reduce real risk within 90 days while maintaining stakeholder confidence.

Related topics:

• Penetration Testing vs Vulnerability Scanning
• What is Vulnerability Remediation? Explained with Examples
• Vulnerability Remediation Timelines: 7 Best Practices
• What Is a Vulnerability Assessment & Why Is It Important?