Cyber-crooks are masters of crime constantly developing, testing and fine-tuning their techniques to mine valuable and sensitive information for their own profit. As such, cyber-attacks come in a wide range of shapes and forms. To illustrate, cyber-criminals use: Advanced Persistent Threat attacks (or APT in short) waging ongoing sophisticated hacking attempts targeted a person, business, or country; phishing attacks (including spear phishing an whaling) to steal sensitive information; password-stealing attacks; and ransomware attacks. The damage caused by those attacks keeps rising, expected to hit $6 Trillion by 2021.
Organizations of all types and sizes are facing these attacks on a daily basis knowing that they will never be 100 percent secure. They know too well that any determined and skilled attacker will eventually be able to breach even well-protected defenses if persistent enough. This leaves them in the sad situation that they are waiting for an attack to happen and then have to mitigate the damage which can be substantial. To illustrate: IMF (International Monetary Fund) estimates that the average annual losses to financial institutions from cyber-attacks could reach a few hundred billion dollars a year.
Needless to say, organizations are very much aware of this and are looking for ways to keep as safe as Fort Knox. They are looking at options such as purchasing more security products that might help them to prevent the next attack, drafting and imposing new procedures to protect their network and employees, rolling out training programs to educate their staff about cyber-security, hiring external experts and consultants to help them to reduce the risks, reviewing their relationships with their service providers to ensure that the latter comply with the relevant data security rules and regulations, etc.
Organizations are also bombarded with calls for action, such as securing remote access, encrypting data packets, reviewing credentials policies, updating and patching vulnerabilities, updating and running agents and much more. It’s all overwhelming, time and cost intensive BUT how would they know whether they are prepared or not prepared for the next cyber attack?
That’s why they are looking for a strategic approach that will not only streamline their cybersecurity efforts, but also reap the benefits that they want, need and expect. Such an approach needs to be proactive, not reactive. They need to be prepared before an attack will take place, taking into account that most breaches won’t tend to share identical characteristics (although cybercrooks might use a number of similar attack vectors) and won’t reveal the same vulnerabilities in their victims’ security postures. This means that they need to be prepared for both known and unknown attacks.
To be prepared, organizations need to think and act like real threat actors using a wide range of malware tools and attack techniques in a safe and controlled way. That’s why we at Cymulate enable organizations to run sophisticated cyberattack simulations themselves at any time that is convenient for them. Our successful Breach & Attack Simulation (BAS) platform allows them to run real cyberattacks in their own production environment in a safe manner without harming their network in any way. It allows them to check how well they would cope with such attacks in real life. The BAS platform gives a fresh perspective regarding their existing practices security controls and policies and will identify all security flaws. Since the platform provides not only the results of the simulation, but also recommendations to mitigate detected vulnerabilities, it will allow organizations of all sizes and industries to make the necessary changes in their data security products & services, policies, and training programs to boost their cybersecurity posture. Remember: forewarned is forearmed!
Test the effectiveness of your security controls against possible cyber threats with a 14-day trial of Cymulate’s platform.
Don’t speculate, Cymulate