Breach and Attack emulation platforms (BAE) are an emerging cybersecurity technology and the new and improved way of testing a company’s security capabilities. Older methods such as tabletop exercises or white box testing have shown to be less than ideal in many cases. When you’re testing your company’s ability to respond to cyber attacks, it’s important that you accurately emulate real-world cyber attacks. This is where breach and attack emulation (BAE) has the edge, it’s designed to show companies how well or how poorly they respond to real-world cyber threats.

One problem many companies have is that they invest thousands or millions of dollars into a cybersecurity solution and have no reliable way to know that their security controls and processes will be effective when a data breach happens. The traditional solution to this is to perform manual testing, but this comes with its own set of problems. Many companies don’t have the in-house expertise to properly perform security testing, which means time and money must be spent on outside consultants. Even in situations where there is in-house expertise you still have to dedicate a large number of resources to perform that assessment and there’s always the possibility of human error or bias, causing the results to be suboptimal. There are nearly 400,000 new bits of malware identified per day, it’s unreasonable to expect any person or team of people to be able to test for each of these attack vectors. Lastly, manual security testing can only provide point-in-time assessments rather than an ongoing assurance that your security controls are working.

These common limitations are exactly why breach and attack emulation software is becoming so popular as an emerging cybersecurity technology, especially among small-medium businesses that don’t have a lot of resources to throw at fixing security issues. Here are the top 5 reasons why you should consider using a BAE platform:

1. Continuously Validate Your Cybersecurity

By using a BAE platform, you will be able to test and validate your cybersecurity posture over an extended period of time. The traditional methods of security testing are not only expensive, but they only provide point-in-time assessments. As the cybersecurity landscape continues to change, rThreat’s platform can help you emulate real-world attack vectors that reflect how TTPs have changed over time. Lastly, because software solutions are more consistent than human testing, you will have a repeatable and continuous measurement of your organization’s security posture for years to come.

2. Justify Your Cybersecurity Investments

In order to ensure that you can continue to get budgets and approval for your projects, it’s important that you are able to demonstrate the ROI of your security controls. Breach and attack emulation will allow you to test your newly deployed tools and processes so that you understand how effective they are and optimize them to have the biggest possible impact. Companies spend millions of dollars per year on cybersecurity without being able to calculate their true ROI. Rather than assuming your ROI, BAE can help with assessing the value of your investments to make sure you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck and allow you to demonstrate your value to upper management.

3. Correctly Prioritize Risk and Remediation

By using a BAE platform, you can build a threat modeling process that will help you understand what your company’s biggest risks are. This will allow you to prioritize your efforts and make your team as efficient as possible. A good breach and attack emulation platform will get rid of the noise and help you answer the questions of:  Where should you spend time, money, and resources first? What is the most critical patch necessary? What are our most valuable assets? What is the most dangerous threat actor for us?

4. Enhance Your Security Team

The main purpose of BAE is to automate the process of continuous testing. BAE is a great way to increase the speed and effectiveness of your red and purple team activities. It saves you money, time and has been proven to be more effective than manual penetration testing in looking at the holistic view. This doesn’t mean that they will replace manual penetration tests or vulnerability scanning, but it’s an excellent supplement for improving your security team.

5. Support Compliance Efforts

It’s important that you can prove to auditors that your company has effective security controls and processes that are required for your compliance needs. By testing your company’s controls with attack emulation, you can provide external auditors and management with proof that your security programs are effective and achieving their goals.

How rThreat Can Help

Breach and attack emulation platforms are a great way to supplement your security operations. As described by Gartner they provide “a consistent way to continuously test your controls, from prevention to detection (and even response).” It’s almost undeniable at this point that BAE solutions are a natural part of the evolution of threat detection capabilities; a proactive rather than reactive security control. Implementing this emerging cybersecurity technology to your security stack can provide immense benefits to your security posture.

rThreat’s breach and attack emulation solution helps companies improve their security in three steps. Firstly, it evaluates a company’s environment by collecting evidence that allows for decision-making based on measurable results. Next, it helps optimize the client environment by suggesting steps to strategically improve existing controls and identifying areas for improvement. Lastly, it demonstrates performance tests, ROI, and overall impact on your security, taking into account the results of the evaluations it carried out. rThreat’s next-generation breach and attack emulation technology creates threat samples from both known and unknown/ZeroDay threats. If you’re interested in learning how this works, you can request a demo here.

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