The Principle of Security Validation

The principle of security validation was established by Cymulate to help organizations enhance their cyber resilience and improve their cybersecurity posture against today’s sophisticated threats.

Security Validation is a fundamental principle in cybersecurity aimed at ensuring that systems, applications, and processes are secure and operate as intended. 

By adhering to the principle of security validation, organizations can identify weaknesses in their security posture, address vulnerabilities across their IT estate, and improve overall resilience against cyber threats.   

Under the principle of security validation, there are several key essential elements that are involved to adhering to the principle. These key essentials include: 

• Validation of Security Controls: Confirmation that the security controls, such as email gateways, web gateways and firewalls, endpoint and cloud security, access controls, etc., are effectively implemented and function as expected.  
• Validation of Threats: Active testing for the latest persistent, emerging, and immediate threats discovered by the threat intelligence community and validated daily. 
• Validation of Operational Response: Evaluation of security operations team to respond to alerts and recover from security incidents. This includes running purple teaming simulations and drills to assess the effectiveness of security operations and incident response plans.  
• Simulation & Modeling of Attacks: Organizations can simulate and enact various breach and attack scenarios within a safe, controlled environment with an attacker's approach applying the latest threat tactics and techniques that will better prepare their defenses to stop such attacks.  
• Compliance Verification: Ensuring that the security measures adhere to relevant industry standards, regulations, and best practices. Compliance validation often involves audits and assessments against standards such as ISO 27001, NIST, PCI DSS, GDPR, etc.  
• Continuous Improvement: Security validation is not a one-time event but an ongoing improvement process that begins by benchmarking an organization's risk level against peers in their industry. Security validation measures the performance of controls, threats, and responses over time with frequent assessments that help ensure security measures remain effective against evolving threats and changes in the IT environment and that these measures do not drift over time. 

Security Validation Best Practices 

As a recognized authority on security validation, Cymulate has published an eBook to outline the best practices for validating security controls, threats, and operational responses across the IT environment.  

These best practices have been established within the Cymulate Platform based on years of red team, blue team, purple team experience, testing and validating security operations and technologies, informed by the latest threat intelligence from the Cymulate Threat Research Group.  

The Cymulate best practices provide comprehensive assessments to validate security controls, immediate and persistent threats, and security operations response, to help security teams improve their defensive posture against the latest cyber attacks. 

Over the coming weeks, we will publish a series of blogs for each of the above components to provide more insight into the types of attack simulations that should be executed to validate each component and the frequency at which we recommend each component be tested to stay protected. 

By implementing these best practices across your cyber program, you will build confidence and trust (with metrics and evidence) that your IT environment is secure and that your controls and practices can withstand the latest attacks from sophisticated threat actors. 

If you would like to see all the best practices for every component, you can download the Security Validation Best Practices eBook.

Of course, if you would like to see these best practices in action, you can schedule a demonstration of our security and exposure validation solution.