End the Exposure Enigma with Security Validation

By Tom Poore, Director, Product Marketing – Americas

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TLDR - automate your way out of weak security postures with Pentera

Every day, security teams face the daunting task of identifying and managing security gaps in their ever-growing attack surface. Digital transformation initiatives, cloud migration, mergers & acquisitions, and myriad other changes impacting the IT environment constantly expose the business to new risks.

Herein lies the enigma: Despite significant investment in security tools and risk mitigation processes, organizations are often perplexed when it comes to measuring their security effectiveness, and demonstrating ongoing improvement. They are walking and yet staying in the same place.

Traditional vulnerability-based approaches have proven ineffective, producing long lists of vulnerabilities without revealing and prioritizing those that truly cause exposure. Organizations must adopt the hackers mindset to fully understand their security posture. This is precisely where automated security validation steps in.

Seeing Security From The Adversary Perspective
Security validation involves safely emulating real attacks against your systems to reveal weaknesses such as misconfigurations, exploitable software vulnerabilities, or at-risk credentials. By adopting the adversary perspective, organizations can accurately measure resilience to attacks and identify remediable gaps before exploitation.

Empowering Continuous Validation at Scale
Organizations need to continuously validate security efficacy against evolving threats and changing attack surfaces. Human penetration testers and red teams cannot meet the demand for enterprise-scale high-frequency testing. The solution is automation: a virtual team of pentesters carrying out emulated real-world attack scenarios at machine speed. Based on findings available in hours – not days or weeks – the top priority issues can be remediated based on risk impact, and testing immediately rerun to ensure changes are effective.

Key Pillars of Automated Security Validation

1. Attack Surface and Technique Coverage: Comprehensive mapping of the organization's attack surface should be provided, as well as a detailed overview of all potential attack routes, incorporating techniques such as password sniffing and cracking, malware injection, and lateral movement.
2. Emulation of Real Attacks: Authenticity is critical, mimicking the behavior of actual attackers as closely as possible in the live IT environment. This level of realism offers invaluable insights into potential vulnerabilities that may go unnoticed and offer true validation of security controls.
3. Testing Full Attack Kill-Chains: The testing must progress every scenario until its completion so that security teams can accurately assess how impactful each attack can be and which vulnerability along the attack kill-chain is the most effective for mitigation.
4. Impact Based Prioritization: It is critical to reveal true risk exposure with evidence-based findings and provide actionable remediation prioritized based on their risk impact, allowing organizations to focus remediation efforts on the vulnerabilities that matter the most.
5. Safety without Compromise: Security enhancements should never come at the expense of operational continuity or asset integrity. A practical solution inherently prioritizes safety, ensuring the validation process doesn't inadvertently disrupt core business operations.

Fortify Your Security Posture with Pentera
Cybersecurity threats will continue to evolve, and organizations must prepare with proactive security tools that match the pace of change. Pentera's Automated Security Validation platform revolutionizes security validation, automatically uncovering critical exposures by challenging the internal network, cloud, and external attack surface. By safely emulating the actions of an attacker, the platform conducts large-scale, real-time security validation, providing prioritized remediation guidance. Security validation is required today to ensure your organization is prepared for tomorrow's challenges.