Put your Blue Teams on the Offense by Optimizing Security Controls

Relying on outdated, manual technology processes can undoubtedly leave you and your organization vulnerable and with a weakened security posture. Positioning a Blue Team on the offensive can be your strongest move by empowering them with automation combined with frequent security control testing. This makes having clear and up-to-date information of high-risk attack paths, easy-access entries and misconfigurations an armed solution.

Are your traditional methods still secure?

In 2024, saying the words ‘traditional’ and ‘cybersecurity’ in the same sentence might not seem logical, but in an industry that moves at lightning speed, that’s exactly where we are today with no sign of slowing down. Global spending in the cybersecurity industry is nearly $200 billion each year, with software and controls accounting for about half. With more pressure from leadership and boards growing to show proof of quantifiable data security and threat protection, it’s no wonder that Red Teams are an expensive line item.

Penetration Testing vs. Security Control Validation

Penetration testing (pen testing) and security control validation are two distinct approaches to evaluating an organization’s security posture. Pen testing is more of a traditional approach, while security control validation is a distinctly more modern answer to testing security vulnerabilities.

Traditionally, Red Teams make the first move when it comes to validating an organization’s security posture. However, with a more advanced approach, Blue Teams can now take matters into their own hands. By using their own managed security controls, they can do things like create rules in their EDR and WAF to block exploitation attempts of known vulnerabilities and adversary techniques.

Pen testing is not only a manual process, but a costly one, limited in scope and has reduced defense efficacy. This could leave you with dangerous blind spots in your security framework, leaving plenty of time and space for a malicious actor to crawl in and cause severe amounts of damage. In addition, pen tests only provide a point-in-time assessment, when vulnerabilities can emerge or be exploited after the test is completed, leaving findings irrelevant.

Security control validation, on the other hand, provides a continuous and automated approach, is 100% owned and managed by the "blue team". Compensating controls for vulnerabilities that in order to be patched must be dependent on the patch management process owned by a different team (usually IT), reducing the risk of blind spots. Pen tests are most effective when integrated into a multi-layered defense strategy.

Out with the old and in with the new

Put yourself in the mindset of a threat actor – someone that is on the constant hunt for your organization’s weaknesses. Therein lies the purpose and need for security validation. The ability to quickly identify and locate the gaps provides confidence that your security controls are functioning properly and effectively. This delivers an automated tool that you can assertively run in the background supporting security control validations. This approach puts the Blue Team in full control.

Automating your control testing is a significant investment, however, ensuring that the pieces from security controls, endpoint to cloud are all working properly is critical and must not be skipped. Automating these checks and balances helps ensure a holistically secure environment.

3 Ways to Automate Your Control Testing

• Optimize what you have: Security Control Validation allows you to use what you already have while making consistent improvements by implementing new detection rules for the latest threats. This also applies to your MSPs.
• Measure continuous improvements: Setting a baseline of where you are today from a security standpoint allows you to measure even the most incremental changes and improvements over time. This can impact things like the efficacy of the tools’ utilization of the constantly changing threat landscape.
• Manage drift: Having full visibility into your IT environment is critical when it comes to maintaining control of changing policies and applications in the cloud, avoiding any unnecessary gaps.

The Power of Breach and Attack Simulations

In addition to the steps above, breach and attack simulation (BAS) can also be a game-changing way to know if your security controls are intact and working. By simulating an attack, you can discover where your vulnerabilities are and seal them with security controls. A thorough security control validation solution will provide the following in attack simulations:

To optimize the following security controls:

Are You Prepared for an Attack?

What happens when an attack does happen? Are you prepared? Being confident in your security tools to keep threat actors at bay long enough to activate your breach response plan is essential to organizational survival. Here are six essentials to help you identify weaknesses in your security controls, address threats to your valuable IT assets and improve the overall security operations resilience:

1. Validation of threats
2. Validation of security controls
3. Simulation and modeling of attacks
4. Validation of operational response
5. Compliance verification
6. Continuous improvement

The processes shown above can help ensure the effectiveness that security controls are functioning properly and mitigating the risks they are designed to address. Security control validation is also able to uncover any weaknesses before they become larger exploits for attackers.

With more regulations coming out, like DORA, it is more critical than ever for you to stay vigilant about compliance standards, such as GDPR, HIPAA or PCI-DSS. And that’s just one way for cyber criminals to take advantage of more sensitive industry marks. This guidance applies across all industries where a digital criminal can leave their stamp.

With regular validation of security controls, the Blue Team is now in an offensive position to improve incident response, enhance and strengthen overall security posture, support risk management and boost the confidence of stakeholders, customers and partners that security is taken seriously and appropriate measures are in place to protect assets and data.

To learn more about the importance of bringing security control validation into your Blue Team’s offense, check out this webinar replay.