Offensive security is a practice of developing proactive security strategies that use the tactics threat actors would in real-world attack scenarios to root out vulnerabilities in order to strengthen the security posture. The most common offensive security methods include vulnerability assessments, red teaming, and penetration testing.
These offensive security operations are securely and responsibly carried out by cybersecurity professionals like security engineers, pen testers, and threat hunters who use their knowledge and reverse engineering skills to find vulnerabilities and recommend patches to prevent system flaws from being exploited.
Because this helps companies stay ahead of threats, offensive security is widely seen as complementing defensive security. It makes defensive security more effective at keeping bad actors out.
The Value of Threat Simulation in Offensive Security
The most important part of offensive security involving threat simulation is penetration testing. It is a mock of cyberattacks designed to find vulnerabilities in systems.
Essentially, security engineers manually find vulnerabilities by adopting an attacker’s perspective—responsibly simulating real-world attacks by imitating the tactics of cybercriminals to help organizations improve their defensive security.
But to understand the real value of threat simulation, it’s useful to consider how we evaluate the efficacy of defensive measures. This is because defensive security tools, such as antivirus software and firewalls, are reactive by design; they either block known threats or detect suspicious behavior.
While defensive security measures can protect against known attack vectors, they still leave organizations exposed to new and unknown cyber threats. This is why offensive security activities like penetration testing are essential for companies to test their ability to withstand real attacks. It’s also why security teams use threat simulations to discover and respond to unknown attack vectors that defensive security measures might miss.
Why Threat Simulation is Important?
Threat simulation tremendously helps identify and address flaws before threat actors can exploit them at scale. It produces outcomes that enhance the effectiveness of defensive security because the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that security practitioners use are based on the methods employed by threat actors.
This reduces the burden on security teams by discovering potential vulnerabilities that real hackers might exploit, ensuring your defenses are strong and resilient.
Because human security practitioners conduct penetration testing exercises, and they can discover vulnerabilities that automated vulnerability scanning or threat detection tools might miss, and they do not produce false positives because they test the vulnerability as an attacker would.
Why is this important? If a vulnerability can be exploited by ethical hackers, it is a strong possibility that it can also be exploited by malicious actors. For this reason, external penetration testing vendors are recommended, as they can bring a fresh perspective and expertise to identify weaknesses that internal security teams might miss.
Parting Thoughts
Threat simulation is essentially adversarial simulation—an exercise in which security researchers use the TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) of real-world hackers to launch a simulated attack against systems in order to exploit any vulnerabilities.
And it is important to note that in penetration testing exercises or risk assessments, security researchers must responsibly exploit attack vectors within established guidelines, without causing actual damage, to see how far an attacker could go and what the implications could be for an organization. This is crucial because it provides the organization with insights into their incident response procedures.
Most organizations will either employ security tools like PTaaS platforms or contract penetration testing to a third-party offensive security company to test their technical defenses and simulate cyberattacks.
Siemba offers a comprehensive range of offensive security services, including expert-led penetration testing and automated vulnerability assessments with near real-time threat detection through their PTaaS platform. Get in touch with our engineers today to learn how we can help harden your security posture.
