What is a major drawback of penetration testing compared to vulnerability scanning?

Penetration testing involves simulating cyberattacks to identify potential vulnerabilities and exploit them, which can have unintended consequences on the systems being tested. As a result, this activity can disrupt normal operations, potentially causing outages, data loss, or performance issues. Organizations typically need to schedule penetration tests during off-peak hours to minimize the risk of disruption, which highlights this as a significant drawback compared to vulnerability scanning.

Vulnerability scanning, on the other hand, is a more passive approach that identifies known vulnerabilities in systems without attempting to exploit them, ensuring that normal operations remain unaffected. This inherent difference in methodology between penetration testing and vulnerability scanning emphasizes the disruptive potential of penetration tests and their operational impact.