Enterprises face more cybersecurity threats than ever before. Despite the rapid advances security tools have made over the past few years, breaches continue to frequently occur. The modern enterprise needs a range of cybersecurity tools, backed by robust security protocols like MITRE ATT&CK to prevent a costly breach.
Breach and attack simulation is an effective tool for organisations looking to gain a full picture of their vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management is a challenging task due to the ever-growing list of threats. Here’s how breach and attack simulation brings context and helps you prioritise your risks.
Links Vulnerabilities To Assets
Common Vulnerability Scoring Systems (CVSS) scores are an invaluable tool for any CISO. However, these scores often leave critical context out of the picture. At best, they offer you input when designing an optimal patching schedule. However, modern organisations must quantify their vulnerabilities, and this is where breach and attack simulation software shines.
Aside from listing vulnerabilities, these tools give you more context, such as listing the ones that can be exploited and how an attacker might exploit them. Most importantly, you can link vulnerabilities to assets, giving you a risk-based map of which threats you must prioritise.
Prioritising risks by asset vulnerability also helps you quickly figure out if you need any compensating controls to mitigate risk. Breach and attack simulation replicates the attack methods a real-world attacker might use and fully stress tests your system. As a result, you can trust your reports and build a map of which assets you must first protect.
An additional benefit of classifying vulnerabilities by asset risk is you can quantify the impact security has on your organisation. Instead of merely reporting a list of vulnerabilities to executives, CISOs can offer numbers that measure business impact, leading to easier communication and buy-in.
Cost-Efficient
Breach and attack simulation software has far-reaching effects on the security department’s budget. Security is expensive, and organisations find it challenging to figure out how much to spend and where resources must be devoted. Attack simulation software answers these questions and also introduces efficiency into processes.
Typically, organisations look at a list of vulnerabilities and create a patch schedule automatically. However, which patches are extremely critical, and which ones can be pushed down the road? Security teams cannot answer these questions without additional context, something their current systems do not offer.
Additional context helps teams create a realistic patch list that addresses vulnerabilities based on criticality. As a result, your team will spend more time fixing issues that have the greatest impact, instead of spending valuable time on a patch that has a negligible positive impact.
More from Tech
- Autonomous Systems: Today and Tomorrow
- Dedicated Server Vs VPS Vs Cloud
- 7 Years of PITAKA – Innovation Never Stops
- Are Public WiFi Networks Secure?
- Peel X Discusses What Makes a Great Augmented Reality App?
- AI Writers: The Future of Content Creation or Dangerous Fake News Tool?
- Cyber Budgets Predicted to Rise 11% on Average to 2025
- Plum Data: 61% of Young People Trust AI to Predict Financial Trends
Often, vulnerabilities can be removed by strengthening controls around an asset instead of applying patches. In existing processes, CVSS scores force teams to adopt a surface-level approach to enhancing security. The result is costly time spent applying patches instead of adopting more efficient processes.
Attack simulation software reports also help security teams figure out their workload priorities. The result is optimal workload management, with each team member working on issues that have the most impact. By prioritising patches and responses to vulnerabilities in this way, organisations will automatically realise a robust security posture.
Lists Second-Order Effects
Knowing that you have a vulnerability is important. However, understanding the effects it will have on the rest of your network and related systems is critical. Breach and attack simulation software helps you figure out whether an attacker can escalate or move laterally within your environment.
As a result, your vulnerability risk assessments become far more effective. For instance, a small vulnerability in one environment might pose a huge risk in another. Connecting the dots like this is challenging due to the infrastructure and network sprawl at modern enterprises. A tool that centralises risks and offers context on which ones are business-critical is invaluable.
Listing how an attacker might exploit a vulnerability is also important since it might lead to other environments being compromised. A vulnerability in a related environment might lead to a breach in another, without affecting the first one. While existing cybersecurity tools do a good job of gathering threats, they work in a limited landscape and do not offer critical context to CISOs.
Typically, teams must gather these alerts onto a custom platform and prioritise risks themselves. Breach and attack simulation assists this task by offering readymade context, simplifying risk classification.
Context Is Vital In Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity tools offer great insights into the area they’re proficient in. However, linking various alerts together to build context is challenging. Breach and attack simulation software offers deep context into vulnerabilities and links them to assets, giving CISOs and their teams the ability to quantify the impact and communicate it to non-technical users.
The post 3 Ways Breach And Attack Simulation Assists Enterprise Vulnerability Management appeared first on TechRound.