Why do so many teams rely exclusively on “test.acunetix.com” or similar demo environments for web vulnerability scanning tool evaluations? Over the years, I’ve seen pentest tool reviews, solution benchmarks, and even some POCs base their findings on results against these canned, purposely-vulnerable targets. Isn’t this approaching “lab hero” territory, where you’re only working with best-case, toy scenarios?
How does running scanners on demo playgrounds translate (or fail to translate) to real-world production app security? Are we missing the gap between demo efficacy and the tools’ actual performance on custom-coded, modern web apps with non-standard behavior? Wouldn’t a better approach be to spin up more realistic, in-house web app targets, or at least add them into the mix for tool evaluation and team training?
Curious to know if anyone’s built a solid methodology for bridging the demo-vs-production chasm, and if vendors are actually sharing realistic test cases these days—or just the same old purposely broken “cheat sheet” sites.