Exploitation – Why bother?
There is a good possibility that your potential clients will not understand the benefits of performing a full penetration test. Simply enumerating the known vulnerabilities in a network environment is not sufficient to truly understand the effectiveness of the corporation's combined security controls; be prepared.
Here is a quick listing of common benefits that full exploitation provides:
Takes the guess work and doubt out of the equation: By providing proof that critical infrastructure devices were compromised, and thus confidential data could have been leaked, altered, or made unavailable, the problem becomes "real" and the management team will have the necessary details needed to take steps towards remediation.
Validates mitigating controls actually...mitigate: Rather than blindly accepting that a theoretical mitigating control actually works a full exploitation penetration test enables management to prove the security measures are working as intended.
Finds...