Breach and Attack Simulation – Know Your Enemy

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

For millennia, military strategists around the world have recognized that thinking like the enemy is one of the best ways to anticipate what they’re going to do and so defeat them. With the numbers of attacks rising year-over-year, traditional lines of defense just aren’t good enough anymore. Breaches appear everywhere, with attackers steadily advancing, and no organization should neglect approaches that look at their defenses from the viewpoint of the attacker.

Proactive security strategies

A large numbers of organizations are coming to see that a proactive security strategy is one of the best defenses. You need to see where the threats are coming from, how they can move within your network, where the vulnerabilities in your defenses are, find them and close them before cyber attackers take advantage of them.

To become proactive on the security front, it’s vital that you identify in advance the vectors of attack that will be utilized and remediate security issues as they are created and before they are exploited. For that, you need a continuously running campaign of tests running against your current defenses with simulations in your real environment: that’s where breach and attack simulation comes in.

Generally, an organization won’t realize where exactly  it was vulnerable in terms of its defenses until the attack comes, by which time it’s too late to fix these vulnerabilities. If you are continually testing your security, you can uncover the attack paths and remedy these failings before attackers find out about them.   Proactive Reactive.

Moving to ongoing security testing

Networks are dynamic, security systems are extremely complex, and IT demands are changing constantly, adding new systems, software, hardware, new levels of security, of permissions etc. All this takes time and money, and to protect investments, automated security testing is a very efficient solution.

If you are continuously and automatically testing your security posture, not only will you know that your defenses are prepared and in place, you can also improve your security posture by identifying the areas that are vulnerable to attack.

The introduction of breach and attack simulation

Cybersecurity, for many firms, has started to resemble a military drill. It really is a war zone out there, and only the latest proactive practices and processes will keep you from defeat. The military keeps their soldiers on their toes by continuously running wargames; cybersecurity experts should be doing the same by running simulated cyber-attacks.

What XM Cyber’s automated cyber-attack simulation provides

> With red team operations running continuous campaigns, simulated cyber attacks will show you attack paths and weaknesses in  your IT systems and your network.

> Running continuous campaigns helps identify vulnerabilities as changes happen in your network, it is not a point in time testing methodology.

> You will receive an actionable remediation plan with the critical issues to be fixed in order to avoid lateral movement to your critical assets.

Employing HaXM by XM Cyber simulation testing means that you always know how well your defenses are working, and if there are any security issues. You will be able to identify holes in your defenses before the attackers do, protecting your most vital assets and strengthening your security posture to repel them.