Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)

Breach and Attack Simulation: The Proactive Approach towards a Secure Future

Gartner defines Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) as a technology "that allows enterprises to continually and consistently simulate the full attack cycle against enterprise infrastructure, using software agents, virtual machines, and other means."

Over the last two decades, the crucial need to protect increasingly digitised enterprises from cyberthreats has driven international spending on cybersecurity products and services to multi-billion dollars per annum. However, adversaries are still able to breach an organisation's security defences. The problem is apparent: Security is tricky; misconfigurations and vulnerabilities are common, leading to breaches.

It is critical to stay one step ahead of attackers, to find attack paths from the breach point to your crown jewels. Therefore, it is time to reconsider security validation.

Bringing a change in mindset

Security teams aim to test the effectiveness of their organisational defences through organised red and blue team exercises. These activities are led by security professionals and staged under controlled environments, providing a clearer picture of an organisation's security landscape. However, while these practices have always been an essential safety means, they suffer from a critical disadvantage: They are highly manual and resource-intensive. Moreover, most organisations can only perform these operations periodically. This grey area between two successive engagements opens a path for unpatched vulnerabilities to rise, and defenders have little visibility into their security environment's actual state.

See through an attacker's point of view.

Achieving threat readiness visibility is crucial for every organisation to acquire in today's environment. The path to safeguarding your IT environment, personnel, and business is through an attacker's perspective. Hence, a proactive strategy to obtain a repeatable and continuous measurement of your security posture in this modern threat landscape.

A breach and attack simulation platform solves this problem by simulating the critical functions as red and blue teams but continuously and efficiently.

Benefits of Breach and Attack Simulation

• A breach simulator simulates, assesses and validates the latest attack techniques used by adversaries, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other hostile entities. The scope of these simulations is to undergo the complete attack path to an organisation's vital assets and provide a prioritised checklist of remediation actions for the vulnerabilities discovered.
• It can test all your controls, simulating malicious attacks on your endpoints, antivirus software, content filters, data loss prevention capabilities, firewalls, email, and your intrusion prevention system.
• It can provide continuous coverage and assessment of your security infrastructure to provide more in-depth visibility of your infrastructure attack readiness.
• BAS solutions utilise the MITRE ATT&CK framework, which is crucial for understanding how your security system will stack up to the modern techniques of cybercriminals.

Conclusion

BAS platforms like FourCore ATTACK can play a critical role in defending critical organisational assets by simulating real-world attack techniques across all attack vectors and providing actionable and prioritised threat remediation. Employing BAS solutions to perform automated and continuous threat simulations provides non-stop protection. In addition, it allows defenders to bring a more aggressive stance towards maintaining security across all aspects of a security environment.

Open Source Cyber Attack Simulation

firedrill is an open source attack simulation project by FourCore, built on the fundamentals of our commercial platform: FourCore ATTACK. Try it now and perform attack simulations on your systems now, download the latest release from GitHub. Read more on the blog here: firedrill.