Protecting Brand Reputation in FMCG: Reaching 4x Testing Capacity Using Trickest
Faced with growing brand and compliance risks, offensive security teams are under constant pressure to do more with less. They must test everything from high-volume marketing microsites to business-critical applications, all while keeping pace with a constantly changing attack surface.
A global consumer brand needed repeatable testing for a flood of short-lived promo sites; without taking fragile pages down or burying analysts in recon noise. The team rethought their approach, automated what could be automated, and ultimately quadrupled their capacity without adding headcount or sacrificing depth and control.
Challenges
High Volume of Ephemeral Campaign Sites
The team had to test ~30 promotional websites every month. Most were single‑page and lived only 1–2 months, yet each carried real risk: a single compromise could expose PII and damage brand reputation. With fragile promo sites sometimes taken offline by aggressive scans and every site requiring verification, manual reviews became a bottleneck, diverting expert focus from higher‑impact initiatives and slowing marketing operations.
Noise and Coverage Gaps in Legacy ASM Tools
Legacy platforms missed obvious assets, generated thousands of noisy results, and lacked prioritization. Engineers spent hours filtering false positives, mapping assets for new CVEs, and reviewing bloated reports. Meanwhile, weak security signals like outdated libraries, broken forms, or unusual frameworks often went undetected, leaving blind spots and wasted effort.
The Solution
To overcome these challenges, the team turned to Trickest - because it matched their operating reality:
- Trusted handoff for promo sites → 4× throughput: DAST runs produced inspectable evidence (coverage + artifacts), letting senior testers treat low-complexity sites as automated handoffs; raising monthly throughput from ~8 to ~30 without extra headcount.
- Workflow-level customizability, not a black box: Their in-house recon and niche enumeration plugged into Trickest workflows via visual editor, so "weak signals" (e.g., odd libs/forms) became reusable checks instead of one-off manual notes.
- Operational alignment with pentest process: Scans are triggered on demand as part of their internal pentest flow; sitemap export accelerates manual follow-up in Burp Suite and other manual testing tools instead of re-crawling from scratch.
- Noise control & blast-radius management: Throttling/visibility into request rates helps avoid taking brittle promo sites down (a prior pain around ~15 RPS)
Impact
Impact at a glance: throughput rose from ~8 to ~30 promo-site tests per month (4×) with zero added headcount; manual recon was significantly reduced (less ad-hoc asset validation); stability improved with fewer promo-site incidents via RPS visibility and throttling presets; and a single, more reliable asset inventory cut triage overhead.
Fixing the Penetration Testing Bottleneck
Before
- Senior testers stuck on repetitive promo-site checks
- Frequent re-crawling
- Noisy findings slowed handoff
With Trickest
Trickest DAST becomes first-line:
- Trusted handoff: Inspectable evidence (coverage + artifacts) lets seniors accept low-complexity sites as automated runs
- Post-scan validators: Lower false positives (e.g., SQLi checks re-validated single-threaded)
- Modern app coverage boosts: Application hotspot detection, SPA crawling
- Faster manual follow-up: Sitemap export → Burp removes re-crawl time
- Operational fit: CLI/API triggered when a pentest request arrives; RPS visibility/throttling reduces the risk of taking brittle promo sites down
Results
Turning Expertise into Continuous ASM
Before
- Legacy ASM missed obvious assets
- Weak prioritization
- Analysts did manual recon to trust coverage
- Outdated technology detection was unreliable.
With Trickest
ASM plugged into Trickest’s automation:
- Custom enumeration & in-house checks integrated into scheduled workflows → discovery happens in one place
- Higher-fidelity inventory reduces manual follow-ups and ad-hoc recon
- Operational continuity: Outputs feed the same reports/process
Results
Conclusion
By automating repetitive penetration testing tasks and integrating their own techniques into a reliable automation framework, the team increased throughput from ~8 to ~30 tests per month (4×) with no added headcount, reduced manual recon, and avoided fragile-site incidents.
With discovery and evidence centralized, they now work from a single inventory of record and hand off faster - enabling more secure launches, steadier campaign velocity, and senior time refocused on complex, higher-risk work that advances the organization's security posture. Trickest remains their trusted platform for executing and scaling these efforts.