PKI Insights Recap - Assessments and Pen Tests Are Essential — But Are They Enough for PKI?

April’s PKI Insights webinar put a spotlight on a common misconception in cybersecurity: that assessments and penetration tests (pen tests) are sufficient to secure organizations and ensure your Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is resilient and secure. While helpful for compliance, assessments and pen tests often fail to catch what really matters.

The issue? Pen tests are a snapshot in time. They validate the environment as it was—not as it is. Once the test is complete, the report is already aging, and any changes made afterward go undetected. They are really only effective as a governance tool to determine what insecurities have existed in the environment since the last test.

One real-world example we shared during the session underscored this gap. A customer using PKI Spotlight uncovered 12 vulnerabilities in their PKI. Rather than remediating them immediately, they waited for an upcoming pen test. The result? The pen test caught only one of the 12 vulnerabilities.

This isn’t unusual — many pen tests don’t explicitly check for common PKI-specific issues like SpecterOps or PetitPotam. If those vulnerabilities aren’t named in the report, there’s no guarantee they were even tested.

That’s where PKI Spotlight comes in. Unlike traditional testing, it provides continuous, real-time visibility into PKI environments—monitoring for misconfigurations, drift, and newly introduced risk. It’s proactive, not reactive.

The takeaway is clear: if your PKI isn’t being monitored continuously, it’s not truly secure or resilient.

For those looking to better understand PKI posture management or strengthen their PKI visibility, this session offered a strong case for modernizing the approach.

See for yourself how continuous visibility can transform your PKI security—watch the full webinar on demand above or contact us for a personalized demo of PKI Spotlight.

Up next in the series: Beyond the Firewall: Why Visibility Into Digital Trust Matters for Every Part of the Organization.

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