The breach and attack simulation (BAS) market is projected to experience substantial growth over the next several years. As the market grows, it’s important to understand that breach and attack simulation offers more than security control validation. Breach and attack simulation tools also support business use cases, including strategic security planning, demonstrating ROI, optimizing red team exercises, and supporting continuous threat exposure management. 

Introduction 

The breach and attack simulation (BAS) market is expected to experience substantial growth, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 33.4% between 2022 and 2029, reaching nearly $35 billion in 2029.  

To better understand why this is a booming market, it is important to recognize breach and attack simulation use cases, and how tools like NetSPI Breach and Attack Simulation can help enhance security posture, promote continuous threat exposure management (CTEM), and support executives with cybersecurity strategy and planning. 

Security Control Validation and Defense Readiness 

Organizations continue to heavily invest in their security tech stack to defend against the evolving cyber threat landscape. They are investing in tools such as EDR, SIEM, SOAR, and XDR, and often implement them with out-of-the-box, inadequate, or outdated settings. 

NetSPI’s security experts validate this challenge, finding that nearly 75% of common attack behaviors are missed by EDR, SIEM, and MSSPs.

To be effective, security teams should tailor security detection controls to their unique environment. 

Security teams should test the effectiveness of their tech stack’s security controls through security control validation. This uses common tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to simulate real-world threats and evaluate whether security controls are implemented and functioning as intended by the security vendor. 

By identifying detection control gaps, organizations can fine-tune security controls and continuously validate them with automated tests. This proactive approach allows security teams to optimize detection controls, strengthen security coverage, and improve detection across the cybersecurity kill chain. 

Detect Ransomware Earlier 

Ransomware attacks continue to threaten businesses worldwide, and 59% of organizations reported ransomware hits in 2023. To stay ahead of ransomware, early detection and improved detection capabilities are essential to stop intrusions from escalating into full-scale attacks.  

BAS tools enable organizations to mimic TTPs, patterns, and behaviors that specific ransomware operators use to assess their ransomware detection capabilities and refine their defenses. By regularly testing and adjusting security controls, companies can reduce the risk of ransomware intrusions and enhance their resilience. 

Continuous Threat Exposure Management 

CTEM is a proactive security framework designed to reduce exposure to cyber threats and prevent large-scale cyberattacks.  

According to Gartner by 2026, “…organizations prioritizing security investments based on a CTEM program will realize a two-thirds reduction in breaches.” 

CTEM consists of five stages: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization. BAS tools play a pivotal role in the validation phase, offering continuous assessment of detection controls. This capability strengthens an organization’s defense against evolving threats, providing detailed prevention guidance and continuous testing capabilities.

Strategic Planning and ROI 

BAS tools are invaluable for strategic planning, providing insights that help justify security investments. Most BAS solutions offer visualizations and reports of security coverage that demonstrate return of investment, and can be used in discussions with stakeholders about cybersecurity priorities.  

NetSPI Breach and Attack Simulation offers additional features to help security leaders with strategic planning, such as a heat map in a traditional MITRE ATT&CK matrix that highlights areas needing improvement, detailed prevention guidance, a timeline to demonstrate improvement over time and prove your security investments are producing measurable results, and a comparison of security vendors’ detection capabilities.  

With NetSPI BAS, organizations can make informed decisions, optimize spending, and improve their security strategy.

Red, Blue, and Purple Team Exercises 

BAS solutions can complement and maximize the testing capabilities of red, blue, and purple team exercises. BAS tools can automate some processes of testing detection control capabilities and provide real-time insights into coverage within an organization’s network.  

This capability complements the efforts of red team operations, which are typically tasked with manual penetration testing and strategic attack planning.

By leveraging BAS tools, red teams are equipped with valuable data-driven insights that highlight areas of risk, allowing them to focus their expertise on more complex security challenges. 

NetSPI BAS offers flexibility for advanced users like red teams, enabling the customization and automation of tests, and advanced test capabilities. It also features detailed analytics and reporting, educational resources, thorough test details of specific TTPs, self-running instructions, and remediation steps.

BAS Vendor Comparison 

Benchmarking and comparing the performance of tools in the security stack is a unique use case that NetSPI Breach and Attack Simulation offers. The vendor comparison feature provides a side-by-side analysis of the tools we’re able to detect and unable to detect during tests. This information supports vendor selection during proof of concept (POC) or proof of value (POV) stages, and guides decisions regarding the need for additional or reducing tools. 

The vendor comparison feature empowers organizations to make informed decisions about their security investments, aligning them with their unique needs and objectives. It highlights the detection capabilities of each vendor, facilitating strategic planning and budget allocation. 

Strengthen Your Defenses with NetSPI Breach and Attack Simulation 

Breach and attack simulation tools provide organizations with more than just a method to test and enhance their security detection capabilities. They also support strategic security planning, demonstrate ROI, optimize red team exercises, and enable CTEM programs. As these use cases evolve alongside the changing threat landscape, the BAS market is poised for consistent growth year after year. 

Elevate your cybersecurity strategy by accessing the Ransomware Detection Checklist to strengthen your ransomware detection efforts. 

The post 6 Breach and Attack Simulation Use Cases That Enhance Your Cyber Resilience appeared first on NetSPI.

Enter Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), a powerful solution that enhances your organization’s ability to understand your detection capabilities and improve your security controls to mitigate ransomware threat actors before they can impact you.  

In this article, we’ll explore how BAS can significantly improve your ability to identify and prevent a ransomware threat actor by uncovering gaps in your security detections earlier in the cyber kill chain. We will also discuss common challenges in detection, the benefits of purple teaming and baselining, and how to leverage BAS effectively. 

Table of Contents

• Common Challenges in Ransomware Detection
• Improving Ransomware Detection with Purple Teaming and Baselining
• How to Use Breach and Attack Simulation for Early Ransomware Detection
• Elevating Ransomware Detection with NetSPI BAS

Common Challenges in Ransomware Detection

The Reality of Cyber Threats

The reality is that achieving 100% prevention of cyberattacks is impossible; there will always be unknown vulnerabilities and undetected misconfigurations. Secure-by-default configurations are either non-existent or impractical. If prevention is unreliable, the focus must shift to detection – ideally detection early in the kill chain.

If prevention is unreliable, the focus must shift to detection – ideally detection early in the kill chain.

Vendor Limitations

Relying solely on vendor-provided protection has its pitfalls. Threat actors are often able to acquire these solutions to test their malware and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), finding ways to bypass controls before performing any action in your environment. This is especially problematic if you are running with out-of-the-box configurations.  

Security vendors also are not always able to create detection logic for all cases of attacker behavior. This is because attackers often abuse some type of normal process, which if broadly signatured, would cause many false positives or potentially cause preventions and quarantines that impact a client’s production.

Resource Allocation

Determining where to allocate security resources — time and money — can be challenging. Threat hunting and detection engineering are essential to stay ahead of advanced threats, but these activities require significant investment, both in terms of time and expertise. It demands someone with deep cyber expertise, which many organizations lack, and even if they do have such expertise, it is a time-consuming process and typically involves a well-paid individual.  

NetSPI BAS addresses this by offering detailed detection and prevention guidance as well as research and threat intelligence references for your organization’s defensive personnel. This helps teams start implementing enhancements to detective controls in an informed and effective manner. 

Improving Ransomware Detection with Purple Teaming and Baselining

Understanding Detection Coverage

To understand your detection coverage, it’s crucial to collect data about what your systems observe from various threat actor activities and their TTPs. This includes information about which data sources are available for use in developing detections.  

Start with a baseline measurement of your systems, visibility, and detective controls. This baseline will help you plan, prioritize, and track improvements over time.

Ransomware Simulation versus Baselining

Ransomware simulation assesses security posture effectiveness and readiness to defend against a cyberattack. Another key step in building a robust security posture is understanding how a threat actor views your environment and how ready your organization is to defend against a potential attack.  

By emulating adversary TTPs, purple teaming exercises help security teams identify weaknesses and blind spots in their current defenses. This collaborative approach between red and blue teams ensures that detection and response strategies are collaborated over, refined, and improved. This iterative process is much quicker with live testing and feedback. 

Baselining, on the other hand, involves executing a broad variety of TTPs in your environment and compiling the results together to enable more effective improvement and identification of detective issues. Together, these practices allow organizations to focus where it counts and rapidly fine-tune their defenses, making them more robust and less predictable to the evolving modern ransomware threat.

Effectiveness of Security Controls

Data gathered through this process can reveal how effective your current detection controls are, where gaps exist, and what additional data sources, detections, or security solutions are needed.

The Role of Breach and Attack Simulation

By validating security controls with BAS, you can fine-tune your defenses, build custom controls tailored to your environment, and detect threat actors at the earliest point possible in the cyber kill chain.

The Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) Loop

Adopting the OODA loop in both attack and defense scenarios can significantly enhance your security posture. Purple team activities enable quicker iterations and immediate feedback on control efficacy, giving your blue and red teams an edge over threat actors.

How to Use Breach and Attack Simulation for Early Ransomware Detection

Shifting Left in the Cyber Kill Chain

Detecting threat actors before they fully exfiltrate data or execute a ransomware attack is the key to beating them. Remember, it’s not just about preventing the ransomware event; attackers must first gain a foothold, bypass your internal controls and escalate privileges. Catching any one single activity threat actors perform can derail their plans.

How to Shift Left with BAS

1. Baseline Assessment: Perform a comprehensive baseline assessment to identify security gaps and help prioritize the development of detection and prevention controls around the earlier phases of the cyber kill chain.
2. Identify where you can win early in the kill chain: Look through the baseline at detection misses to see what TTPs to focus on detecting.
3. Improve your detections, technology, and data sources: BAS solutions such as The NetSPI Platform can be used to track and replay these TTPs and provide research and guidance for better detections.

Elevating Ransomware Detection with NetSPI BAS

How NetSPI BAS Works

NetSPI BAS starts with a hands-on baseline assessment by our security pros, The NetSPI Agents, who will thoroughly inventory your current logging sources and detection capabilities. You’ll work with our team or use NetSPI BAS to run emulations of adversary TTPs, giving you data about your overall detection posture — data that can be used for detection creation and tuning, and opportunistically identified misconfigurations. After the engagement, your team can keep testing on NetSPI BAS even after the initial assessment is completed.

Deployment Process

Deploy the BAS agent on systems representing typical defensive configurations within your environment. If you have multiple configurations, you can deploy agents accordingly to test different setups.

Executing Tests

NetSPI BAS uses a series of automated plays that simulate threat actor behavior based on real-world TTPs. You can run plays that emulate ransomware families like CL0P, Cozy Bear (APT29), and other known threats. A key component of rapid iteration and improvement is being able to receive feedback quickly, and with NetSPI BAS you can automate tests to help strengthen your defenses.

Custom Playbooks

Create custom playbooks in NetSPI BAS using searchable MITRE TTPs. This allows you to repeatedly test and track your detective controls across various tactics in the cyber kill chain, from reconnaissance to impact. 

Remediation Tips

Each tactic is accompanied by detailed execution instructions, detection and data source recommendations, and relevant prevention considerations. This guidance helps identify previously unknown logs and detections, helps enable proper logging, and utilize tools to address issues before they escalate. 

BAS is a game-changer for organizations looking to continuously improve their ransomware detection capabilities. By identifying gaps early in the cyber kill chain, BAS empowers security teams to catch intrusions before they escalate, providing a significant advantage in the fight against ransomware. 

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