How to Ensure That Your Organization is Safe from Cyberattacks

Featured article by Jeff Broth

With cybersecurity dangers on the rise, companies are in the habit of adding more protocols and tools that protect their business from expensive cyber breaches.

On average, every company nowadays has at least 35 security points — ways to protect their network and systems.

Nevertheless, attacks keep happening and hackers manage to find vulnerabilities they can exploit — even when it comes to businesses that have multiple security points.

To combat increasing cyber-attacks and make sure that their organization is protected, companies test their security.

To verify if the tools they use to defend the company work, businesses rely on Breach and Attack Simulation.

What do you need to know about Breach and Attack Simulation, and does your company really need it?

What is Breach and Attack Simulation? 

Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) is a tool that imitates various cyberattacks in a safe environment to determine if your organization would be ready for an attack.

While it impersonates attacks on your system to see how it might hold up in a real cyberattack, it aims at weeding out any vulnerabilities that are on your devices.

Since hackers can exploit flaws in your network or even the software that you use to secure your data, simulating an attack is being one step ahead of hackers — because you find and patch up vulnerabilities before they get to use them to get into your system.

Simulations test your network, people who manage your cybersecurity tools, and any protocols that you might have that relate to security.

Is There an Alternative to Breach and Attack Simulation? 

Traditionally, tools and protocols that companies use have been tested with penetration testing (AKA pen testing). Depending on the laws that apply to your organization, it could mean that you’re still obliged to do this type of testing.

Should you still use Breach and Attack simulation?

Compared to the Breach and Attack Simulation, pen testing is more expensive, it is done once or twice a year, and it tests a limited number of tools.

For pen testing, you also need to hire cybersecurity experts — which can be costly.

Since this type of testing is done annually or in some cases biannually, your system could be exposed to cyber threats for the rest of the year. With a network and systems that can change within minutes, this can be a problem.

Pen testing focuses on a single issue. For example, they might use purple teaming to test if your team can handle a specific type of cyberattack or test a chosen part of your system.

Breach and Attack Simulation is run continually, it’s intuitive to use, and even new members of your IT team can understand its analytics. Besides testing the system all the time, you can check if your cybersecurity tools work against a variety of threats.

How Do You Know What to Test? 

You need to be safe from both common cyberattacks and new methods that hackers use to breach networks. Some common types of attacks that hackers have been exploiting for a long time include:

– Phishing — that’s mostly done via email

– Malware — that can lurk behind an internet ad, website, or in the attachment from an unknown sender in your email

– Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) that overwhelms traffic of a website

One reason that you need continual testing of your system is that hackers can find new ways to attack your system and exploit flaws that can lead them straight to your sensitive data.

To test your network against the latest threats, Breach and Attacks Simulation uses the MITRE ATTACK Framework. This resource updates “BAS” by informing it about the latest ways that cybercriminals have tried to breach networks.

Some of the new techniques and methods that hackers have used include:

– Wiper malware — the type of malicious code that can delete all data from a device it attacks and that has been linked to the cyberwar between Russia and Ukraine

– Email hiding rules — hackers have been exploiting the feature within your email to categorize the incoming emails as you prefer and use it to hide infected emails and delete things from your inbox

What Happens After Breach and Attack Simulation?

If the simulated attack has been successful, this means that parts of your system are vulnerable and that you managed to discover that before hackers did.

Following the Breach and Attack Simulation, your IT team gets expert analytics that hints at whether they need to patch up flaws in your system.

They start with the high-risk vulnerabilities and move on to those that are less likely to cause a breach any time soon.

This saves them the time they would spend on the documentation of pen testing because they have an overview of your system by using tools that test and compare previous data and can detect any changes within your system.

Does Your Business Need Breach and Attack Simulation?

Continual checkups are ideal for companies that are growing and thus have complex networks and systems that require additional cyber protection.

That means that they have more tools to manage, and it can be difficult to keep up with all the changes and management that a complex system requires.

If you’ve been using cloud computing technology to scale or to enable remote workers to connect to your systems, your attack surface is constantly and rapidly changing. They’re logging in and out of your systems and altering it every minute as they work.

Frequent changes within your systems can create vulnerabilities that have to be discovered early. That requires continual checkups as to the readiness of your network to handle cyberattacks.

Businesses, regardless of their size, use Breach and Attack Simulation because it’s a cost-effective way of continually testing whether your network is safe from a possible breach.