You can’t protect what you can’t see

When it comes to advanced threat protection from a defensive perspective, you usually make sure to invest in various hardware and software solutions such as Intrusion Prevention Systems. Intrusion Detection System working proactively, analyzing the behavior of the attacks and using AI (Artificial Intelligence), take certain actions to prevent attacks from happening.

The problem occurs because of the lack of testing from an external point of view of these devices. Even vendors who sell these solutions tend to have flaws one way or another that will affect a lot of users using these solutions. This is proven in many ways, through either newly zero-day exploit attacks that are discovered or using different ways of compromising a network of systems by directly attacking the human element with advanced social engineering attacks without even touching the hardware.

Visibility on your network is a very important aspect. Often needs the help of the Offensive Security and Red Teams who do not know your network setup and can be performed as part of ‘Black Box Pentesting’ who train to find these flaws with a certain mindset and experience that should not come from a defensive perspective. This will bring new visibility that would lead to revealing hints as part of reconnaissance techniques requiring real human and manual intervention, to reach a stage of compromising the network, when it reaches the attack phase.

Historically, IPS and such products have provided visibility into network packets to be able to identify and block network attacks, and that is not enough. Even by setting measures to work on a dynamic computing environment such as monitoring Operating Systems, Applications, Mobile Devices, IoT Devices, Virtual Machines, File Transfers, Malware, Malicious Connections, Anomalous Behavior – the reaction is often too slow and late, as we already saw several companies find out about the breach months if not years later.

Visibility Enables Control. Offensive Security is a crucial way of discovering how security researchers see your network from the outside and this is what makes the difference. Such Solutions vary from Bug Bounty Programs, Black Box Pen-testing, and more which should be performed frequently not just for the sake of compliance, but realizing how important it is, to understand and improve the reaction time of when real-time attacks take place to prevent or recover fast from such attempts.

Frequently asking for your infrastructure to be tested is a must, budgets should increase by demanding these types of solutions and prioritizing the essence by understanding the significance of such assessments. Each day multiple vulnerabilities are found, it takes time for vendors to patch them, and even more time for their clients to perform the patching, which leaves a great percent of users and companies vulnerable without knowing it.