Challenges
- Scale application penetration testing engagements without increasing headcount
- Deliver higher value findings within fixed test timelines
- Free penetration testers from tedious discovery work so they can focus on targeted deep-dive testing
Solution
Markus Alliance uses Tenzai as an integral part of every application penetration test. Tenzai performs autonomous reconnaissance, discovery, attack surface mapping, vulnerability analysis, and attack chaining, providing meaningful results within hours. The team then builds on those results with creative exploitation and customer-specific test cases, leveraging Tenzai for follow-on testing and analysis.
Results
- 5× greater penetration testing efficiency, accelerating test execution
- 4× higher attack surface coverage through autonomous discovery and mapping, overcoming the traditional limitations imposed by time constraints
- Greater value from experienced penetration testers, who now spend most of their time on advanced testing
- Doubled engagement capacity without additional hiring, unlocking business growth potential
- Opened the opportunity for expanded service offerings, including the launch of a new low-touch penetration testing tier
“Tenzai has been a complete game changer for our penetration testing team. The hybrid approach, combining the Tenzai platform with our experienced security engineers, lets us do more in one week than we used to be able to accomplish in five.”- Tony Kniffen, Founder and Managing Partner, Markus Alliance
Markus Alliance is a U.S.-based managed security services provider (MSSP) specializing in application penetration testing. With a team of penetration testers completing hundreds of assessments each year, the company built its reputation on deep technical expertise.
In a crowded security testing market, Markus Alliance recognized the need to adopt AI to differentiate its services and achieve growth. The team implemented Tenzai to improve the efficiency and quality of its penetration testing.
Compressing weeks of work into hours
Tenzai automates much of the laborious groundwork previously performed by the team. The efficiency boost is felt especially in the initial discovery phase of an engagement.
Before testers can perform deep analysis, they need to understand how an application works and build a mental model of the attack surface. Traditionally, this often takes days to weeks of manual effort.
Now, each engagement begins with Tenzai autonomously exploring the target application, mapping endpoints, identifying APIs, discovering user roles, and assessing the attack surface. Within 8-10 hours, and before they have done any work themselves, testers already have a rich set of findings in their hands.
The impact becomes even more dramatic across multiple applications. In one customer engagement involving three separate applications, Tenzai assessed all three simultaneously overnight, uncovering dozens of findings in each application before the team arrived the next morning. Rather than spending roughly three weeks learning the applications – one at a time, each taking a week – testers immediately began validating, exploiting, and expanding on Tenzai's discoveries.
Transparency built for security teams
To trust the AI-generated results, Markus Alliance engineers required transparency. Tenzai provides a full record of all of its actions and data, so testers can confidently incorporate them into their work.
“One of the first questions customers ask is whether they can trust AI-generated findings. Once we walk them through the workflow - every action Tenzai took, every finding it produced, and where our engineers took over - it stops feeling like a black box. They see a transparent process where AI accelerates the work, and our team expands on every meaningful result.” -Michael Lisi, Chief Penetration Tester, Markus Alliance
Tenzai equips security engineers with context to guide their work throughout the engagement. Testers regularly use Ask Tenzai in their follow-up testing activities to investigate findings, understand application behavior, export data, and receive remediation guidance – interacting with Tenzai as they would with an additional expert on their team. When needed, testers can also feed Tenzai's discoveries into Burp Suite using the Tenzai extension, enabling follow-on manual workflows.
Uncovering more meaningful security risks
While the operational efficiency gains are significant, Markus Alliance sees the greatest value in better security outcomes for its clients.
Because penetration testing engagements are time-boxed, compromises in coverage are inevitable. Experienced testers naturally focus on the areas most likely to create the highest risk impact, leaving many lower-priority paths unexplored. According to Michael Lisi, an engineer would typically reveal 20-25% of the attack surface in a week of discovery work for a large application.
Tenzai dramatically expands the range of weaknesses and attack techniques that can be tested within the same engagement, resulting in better findings and leads for deeper analysis. Examples include timing attacks that reveal sensitive information through analysis of response-time deviations, source code analysis to identify hidden vulnerabilities and exposed secrets, and chains of low-severity weaknesses that combine into high-impact attack paths.
"The real value of Tenzai isn't just speed and coverage. It's the significance of what we're finding. We're regularly uncovering critical and high-severity issues, many granting admin-level access to software and underlying infrastructure. Tenzai does over a month of human-level work up front, giving our engineers a massive head start and the freedom to focus on our clients' most critical assets." - Tony Kniffen, Founder and Managing Partner, Markus Alliance
Creating business value beyond test operations
Tenzai has enabled Markus Alliance to scale and enrich its services, creating new opportunities for business growth.The company can now offer new service tiers, such as a lower-touch application security assessment for organizations with compliance-driven requirements. In addition, with more meaningful findings identified faster, the team can dedicate more time to collaborating with customers on remediation, validating fixes, and helping prioritize risk, strengthening client relationships.
For Markus Alliance, Tenzai isn't a tool the team uses; it's a partner embedded in every engagement. The company has redesigned its services model to take full advantage of AI-powered security testing, and this shift has changed what's possible: more clients, deeper engagements, and more impactful findings.