Data breaches, nefarious access attempts, and corporation hacks are reaching an all-time high in history. At current standing, almost half of all the companies (49%) in America have experienced a data breach of some sort. With rates of hacking and company exploiting increasing, there’s never been a better time to amp up your cybersecurity.
One of the best ways of ensuring that your system is completely secure is running automated Breach and Attack Simulation. In this article, we’ll be covering exactly what BAS is, as well as touching on the core reasons why your business should be employing this defense testing mechanism.
Let’s get right into it.
What is Breach and Attack Simulation?
Breach and Attack Simulation, also known as BAS, is a cybersecurity protocol that focuses on attempting to breach a company’s cybersecurity to find weak points. These penetration exercises, sometimes called red teaming or pen tests, will highlight where security experts need to restructure defense mechanisms.
As Breach and Attack Simulation is a controlled environment, you’ll be able to ensure that your company remains safe while still putting its defenses to the test. This advanced form of security testing will ensure that your red and blue teams better understand where to focus when you run security training exercises.
While breach and attack simulation can be manual (known as running red and blue team exercises), you can use technology to automate these processes. This automation is recommended as you’ll be able to test more of your system in less time.
Let’s touch on some key vocabulary that’s common in cybersecurity:
- Red Team – Half of your security team will be assigned to the red team during a breach and attack simulation. They will focus on finding and attempting to exploit any weaknesses in the system.
- Blue Team – The other half of your security team will practice defending against the red team, attempting to fix exploitation before the red team gains entry.
- Purple Team – This approach is where you have your red and blue teams work together, feeding each other information to make the breach and attack process even smoother.
- APTs – Standing for Advanced Persistent Threats, these are what Breach and Attack Simulations will try and find and then fix, ensuring that your company’s weak points are covered before potential hackers can access them.
Breach and Attack Simulation will ensure that your organization’s cybersecurity is water-tight.
Why is Running Breach and Attack Simulation important for your business?
There are four core reasons that running automatic Breach and Attack Simulation exercises are vital for building strong cybersecurity defenses. We’ll be touching on:
- Find Holes in Defenses
- Multiple Attacks at Once
- Help Strengthen Red and Blue Team Exercises
- Test Data Sets and Other Appliances
Let’s break these down further.
Find Holes in Defenses
Especially when you’re running a large-scale organization, there is a constant revolving door of people leaving and joining your company. Due to this, many network accounts remain active, even though people have stopped using them. Forgotten aspects like this can lead to vulnerabilities in your system, with hackers potentially using them to gain access to your systems.
By running Breach and Attack Simulations, your system will automatically comb through your digital security, ensuring that any open ports are closed. The closing of these paths of access will make sure that there are fewer avenues of entry for people with malicious intent. Over time, this will keep your business safe and make sure that there is a much smaller chance of you getting hacked.
Multiple Attacks at Once
One of the primary benefits of automating Breach and Attack Simulation is that you’ll be able to test out many streams of attack at once. While a security professional will be able to run some forms of attack, they may not be an expert in everything. This is especially the case when it comes to network breaching, considering there are quite literally over 100 possible attack methods.
If you take a quick look at the MITRE Attack Framework, you’ll see all the different potential ways that hackers can target your system. Instead of working through them one by one, you’ll be able to set your system to test many at once. This will significantly speed up the amount of time that running a Breach and Simulation attack takes, ensuring your system is secure faster than ever before.
Help Strengthen Red and Blue Teams
While automation is efficient, you still need a security team to then manually probe the system. While typically red and blue teams are in the dark as to where they should begin with their defense practices, the results of a Breach and Attack simulation will illuminate the process for them.
By running a Breach and Attack Simulation, you’ll be able to tell your security team exactly where they should focus their energies. The red team will know where to launch their attacks, and the blue team will know exactly how to ameliorate the damage.
A strong BAS foundation leads to more effective red and blue team exercises.
Test Data Sets and Other Appliances
Cybersecurity is more than just defending the central systems of your business. In fact, an organization’s attack surface management is significantly larger than this, encompassing data sets, network applications, and third-party systems.
An effective Breach and Attack Simulation tool will manage to comb through all of the related points of entry to your business. Considering how huge the potential access points are, this automated style of searching will make keeping your business safe significantly easier.
Especially if you have important data that you don’t want falling into the wrong hands, testing with a Breach and Attack Simulation will keep everything safe without you having to worry about putting your business data at risk.
Final Thoughts
Considering that over 300,000 new malware systems are created every single day, with a new hack being deployed every 39 seconds, putting your company’s cybersecurity first is incredibly critical.
By deploying Breach and Attack Simulation software, you’ll be able to automate the process, protecting your business while also providing even further guidance for your own team of cybersecurity professionals.
