Leading Finance Company Validates MSSP
with Cymulate

With Cymulate, the board is more confident about the strength of our security posture and ability to protect against immediate threats.

- Assistant Information Security Manager

Challenge

With a small three-person cybersecurity team, this banking and financial services company relies heavily on security consultants and managed services for security operations and offensive testing. However, the security leader is ultimately responsible for managing the organization’s security controls.

While the company had a security strategy, it wanted to ensure that all its in-house and outsourced tools and processes would protect its consumer-facing applications in case of an attack. The security leader initially contracted with red team consultants to manually assess controls. Specific challenges included:

• Manual control validation 

  The red team manually created and coded all the assessments, taking time and effort. Because this process was manual, it was difficult to be continuous.

• Manual validation of MSSP detection and response 

  The organization utilized red team simulated attacks to assess whether its MSSP-managed SOC services could detect and prevent them. However, because the assessments were manual, they were prone to human error and limited to only select tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IOCs). Additionally, if a gap was found, the SOC needed to wait for the red team to report on each assessment before they could remediate any gaps, increasing time to mitigation.

• Manual threat validation 

  To validate protection against new threats in the wild, the red team would manually create assessments based on media sources and available IOCs. With an average of 30-40 new threats a month, this was a labor-intensive, time-consuming process that delayed the organization if it was protected before an attack might occur.

To solve these challenges, the organization looked to replace its manual, time-consuming methods with automated security control and threat validation.

The Cymulate Solution

After comparing different tools on the market, the company chose Cymulate for its ease of use, scheduling of automated assessments, and actionable reporting with remediation guidance. The organization utilizes Cymulate to build an effective cyber defense by prioritizing patching, improving monitoring and modifying incident response playbooks.

The team also uses Cymulate to:

Benefits

• Automation
  By automating assessments and automatically generating remediation guidance, the security team can work faster and more efficiently — ensuring it mitigates risk before an attack can harm the organization.

• Prioritization
  The Cymulate technical and executive reports generate insights into where the organization’s security is strong, where there are redundant tools, and where more resources are needed because of gaps. The data-based analytics enable the team to prioritize its tasks and focus on the high-risk areas.

• Collaboration
  Cymulate provides numerous integrations to help reduce miscommunication between the SOC and red and blue teams. All detections and alerts are recorded on the Cymulate platform, so it’s easy to tell if and where a gap exists.

• Improved communication
  The CISO uses the Cymulate executive reports to communicate to the board about the organization’s cybersecurity posture and demonstrate how his team mitigates and reduces risk before an incident can occur.

Solution