Why BAS Platforms Should Be Part of Your Enterprise Security Stack

 In this article Avishai Avivi, CISO, SafeBreach, explores the key capabilities of Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) platforms — attack, analyse, remediate, and report — and the value they can add to modern enterprise security stacks.

Modern enterprise security teams are tasked with securing their organizations in the face of numerous challenges, including a rapidly evolving threat landscape, an ever-increasing attack surface, and ongoing enterprise transformation. The IT infrastructure they have in place to support their security initiatives comprises a complex architecture of dynamic networks, cloud deployments, dozens of software applications, and thousands of endpoint devices. Each element of the architecture has its own set of security controls, which form a critical part of the technology ecosystem. 

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But those security controls can quickly become difficult to manage, and their misconfigurations can hinder efficient threat detection and response. These configuration drifts often lead to a lack of visibility into security control performance, resulting in gaps and vulnerabilities that can be exploited by advanced threat actors. To be effective, teams need the ability to easily identify security gaps and quickly integrate improvements into their existing technology ecosystems to minimize the business risk posed by advanced, evolving threats.

Breach and attack simulation (BAS) tools have emerged as a key way to accomplish this, enabling security teams to assess the efficacy of their entire security ecosystem, including the people, processes, and technologies in place. In addition, teams can validate specific controls, including email, endpoint, network, security information and event management (SIEM), web, data-loss prevention (DLP), and more. As a result, security teams can optimize threat detection and response processes and reduce mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR).

4 Key BAS Capabilities

BAS platforms are defined by four key abilities — attack, analyze, remediate, and report. Each of these processes is essential to the efficacy of a platform and are, in themselves, reasons why BAS needs to be part of every enterprise stack.

1. Attack 

BAS platforms run simulated attack scenarios to test an organization’s resilience against them. The best platforms have the most comprehensive playbooks — that is, they have the most attack techniques at their disposal. The more scenarios a platform can run, the more protected an organization is. At a minimum, attack platforms should cover a wide variety of adversary tactics and techniques, including new and evolving threat groups, malware(s), and advanced persistent threats (APTs).

Mature BAS platforms go further, including comprehensive mapping to the MITRE ATT&CK framework that allows security teams to create adversary emulation scenarios to test and verify in-place cybersecurity controls (e.g., network, endpoint, cloud, email) against common adversary techniques.

This functionality allows security teams to prepare for advanced threats as soon as they appear. Simulation alerts triggered by misconfigured controls allow teams to gain visibility into security gaps, helping to inform remediation and response processes.

In addition, to complete coverage of known attacks, a BAS platform also provides a great level of flexibility. Not every known attack is relevant to an organization’s environment or infrastructure. A BAS tool allows security teams to focus on specific attacks and techniques while simultaneously emphasizing and giving testing priority to the threats and threat groups that are most relevant to their organization.

The pinnacle of BAS efficacy is accurately replicating an attacker’s mindset. We have known for thousands of years the importance of “knowing your enemy,” and no tool is better suited for achieving this than BAS. 

2. Analyze 

Once attack simulations have been run, the best BAS platforms provide powerful insight into an organization’s security posture. The vast amount of security-control performance data provided by extensive attack simulations is aggregated to help organizations visualize their attack surface, identify which network segments are the most at risk, and what threat groups are the most dangerous to them. 

BAS systems test and validate a wide variety of security controls, including endpoint, network, data loss prevention (DLP), cloud, and so on. The best BAS solutions provide an additional layer of detection and validation by automatically correlating simulated attacks with alerts and events from multiple security controls, including the ones listed above. This provides security teams with real-time visibility into the effectiveness of these controls and helps automate the process of breach investigation and remediation, making it more effective and efficient, allowing them to identify and fix gaps faster. 

Beyond this, mature BAS platforms have tight workflow integrations with SOAR and ticketing solutions to create an effective closed-loop security solution ensuring automated breach remediation. These integrations can be used to trigger processes for additional information gathering, configuration changes and analyst approvals that are required to direct mitigation and remediation of issues. This, in turn, improves security posture and reduces the risk of a breach over time, allowing security teams to quickly and effectively mitigate issues discovered by BAS. 

3. Remediate

Using the data aggregated in the analysis phase, mature BAS systems provide holistic remediation actions. This is far more efficient than traditional, manual methods in which security teams would address security gaps individually. On top of this, threats are then grouped by categories, such as endpoint, web, network, and email, making it more feasible to coordinate team efforts across the infrastructure in a holistic remediation plan. 

From there, BAS platforms prioritize suggested mitigation actions in a stack, ranked by business risks. They do this through prioritization engines, driven by both the BAS and its contextual information on the general criticality of security gaps. Rankings also depend on business logic defined by the organization to identify higher priority assets clearly. 

This has the doubly important effect of prioritizing mitigation while protecting your most valuable asset — your employees — from burnout due to alert fatigue. By running a breach and attack simulation tailored to their environment, they can prioritize the alerts accordingly and efficiently.  

4. Report 

The best BAS platforms provide comprehensive, digestible reporting that gives stakeholders total visibility into an organization’s security posture. In most BAS platforms, reporting allows security teams and key stakeholders to identify and understand existing gaps, evaluate risk and recognize security drift. Mature BAS platforms go further, breaking down organizational posture into different categories, including the MITRE ATT&CK framework, known attacks and threat groups. 

Breaking down reports in this way is important because it provides security teams, at a glance, with an understanding of the efficacy of existing systems, informs resourcing decisions and enhances strategic alignment. Superior BAS platforms will provide reports that determine an organization’s risk level, map vulnerabilities, calculate the cost of reducing risk and prioritize mitigation actions. 

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To Sum Up… 

In short, BAS platforms, especially the most sophisticated among them, are an invaluable weapon in a cybersecurity team’s arsenal. If utilized properly, they have the potential to remediate tool sprawl, provide unparalleled insight into an organization’s security posture, and integrate seamlessly into existing systems. It is no wonder so many organizations have turned to BAS and have realized the value that it provides. 

Have you implemented BAS platforms as part of your security task? What benefits have you seen? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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