Validating your cyber defence effectiveness through Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)

Introduction

Cyber threats are evolving every day, organizations keep investing on security controls to boost their defence capabilities. However, security investments increase is not necessarily equals to security effectiveness. You may hear from other people making similar assumptions in their cyber defence:

• “Adding security controls will better protect us from attacks”
• “Protect from external attacks will secure our environment”
• “Security controls function already well configured by vendors”
• “All changes are implemented correctly as best practices”

But are they really valid statement? To ensure your security controls deliver substantial value, you can consider deploy Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) solution in your organization

What is BAS

BAS is a proactive approach that automates the process of simulating cyber attacks such as phishing campaigns, malware, or exfiltration, to name a few, and then evaluates the organization’s defences. The aim is continuous identification of vulnerabilities across different devices or systems, keep organization ahead of the evolving cyber threats and minimize the security gaps.

Benefit of BAS

Implementing BAS solutions can improve security posture of an organization in below ways:

1. Proactive identification of security gaps

BAS provide continuous visibility of security gaps in an organization. It makes sure that the vulnerabilities are located and mitigated before they can be targeted by attackers.

2. Automated approach

BAS solutions have the ability to run continuous testing in regular schedule, or on-demand tests, to provide real-time feedback for organization to stay updated with evolving threats.

3. Improve security posture

With limited resources, organization can gather accurate reporting on the weakest links in the security framework, in order to put efforts to improve security posture with less time.

4. Valuable insights

BAS provides valuable insights highlighting the specific vulnerabilities, devices misconfiguration or new attack patterns. This helps organization to review their infrastructure setup, as well as security functioning teams like SOC to build effective detection.

5. Improve incident response process

BAS allows corresponding teams to practice on incident response standard procedure by simulate a real world attack happens. Organizations hence can reinforces their processes.

Conclusion

BAS allows organizations to test their cyber defences against real-world threats in a proactive way. It works as a continuous tool for testing security controls and looking for weaknesses that attackers trying to exploit. Especially if an organization with only limited resources, BAS helps a lot by its automated approach to let you focus on the most critical areas and improve overall security posture in a shorter time.

Vsceptre is partnering with Validations, which is a security validation platform that offer automated BAS operations, together with the most up-to-date threat database and non-intrusive approach that can help to enhance your security posture. To learn more, please don’t hesitate to contact us at charliemok@vsceptre.com