Hack to the Future: Why Attack Simulations are the Future of Security Control Testing
Offense versus defense. Proactive versus reactive. In many parts of an enterprise, teams need to make choices between preparing for upcoming events, or waiting until they occur – and nowhere so much as on the security team. Do you wait until the attackers make themselves known in your networks before you remediate the impact? Or is it better to strategize how and where attacks may take place, so that you can avoid attackers making inroads at all?
In the past couple of decades, when security control testing and attacks weren't quite as sophisticated as they are now, the security posture was more likely to be reactive. Also, traditional testing wasn't designed to be as forward-looking: Its limitations meant that multiple threat vectors couldn't be tested at once, nor could results be derived quickly enough to have rapid impact on attacks.
If traditional testing was part of the past, attacks simulations are very much a part of security today and bode well for fending off attackers in the future. Here are some reasons why:
Attack simulations are designed to...