They’d line up the attack path, schedule a penetration test, ingest the results with varying degrees of follow-through, and call it a day for another year. Back in the 20th century, that might have done the trick.
But, as with recovering on a Thursday after a night out drinking, the stakes are too high to rely on outdated strategies that no longer work. Digital threats evolve nonstop in modern cyberspace, led by expanding groups of sophisticated nation-states and criminal organizations hell-bent on compromising your critical applications, intellectual property, customer information, and bottom line. That’s why the Continuous Penetration Testing as a Service (CPTaaS) program has emerged as an absolute must-have for cybersecurity resilience.
Why Once-A-Year Testing Is So Last Century
Once a year, a company can, at great effort and cost, execute a detailed penetration test. After days of expert effort, that company will have a nice snapshot of the security of its environment as of that year. The trouble is that the environment never stops changing. Employees add and subtract new software and cloud resources, they click on phishing emails and lose credentials, and company developers build insecure application code throughout the year.
For every data point as of this week, the stack will grow and shrink and drift and develop new assets and fragilities over the following 51 weeks. Everything that was secure in January develops serious update fatigue by July. Just as every dog has its day, every daily security boundary has a breachable minute somewhere; and everything that can possibly go wrong will do so all at once, somewhere in someone’s environment between penetration test cycles.
The weak spots will be freshly developed and ready for exploitation, and the bad guys won’t be patient enough to wait a whole year to compromise and then sell or ransom the victim company’s most critical data.
The Biggest Threat to US Businesses Isn’t from Around Here
American organizations face massive, organized, and expansionist threats from countries that have built programs designed to target and compromise organizations on US soil. I’m not talking about the Chinese MSS, Russian GRU, North Korean Bluenoroff (both above and below the 38th parallel), or any number of other dedicated national cyber soldiers.
No, I’m talking about the majority of US businesses that are regularly targeted by what seem like half of the world’s cybercrime chieftains and the secret police. Many have resources practically unrestricted by those of consumer institutions. They have the time, capability, and desire to spend multiple years attacking anything they can collect, compromise, or ransom.
Because this new breed of geopolitical 1s and 0s has high ambition and motivation, companies need a defensive program with the same levels of ambition and motivation. The old program of once-a-year testing and defending, sitting on our hands the other 364 days of the year while the most advanced penetration testers in the world constantly study, test, and profile our points of vulnerability, is suicidal in today’s complex, high-stakes business ecosystem.
How CPTaaS Builds Cybersecurity Resilience
Continuous Penetration Testing as a Service moves from point-in-time security testing to an organization-wide, around-the-clock assessment program. Instead of discovering vulnerabilities once a year, businesses can uncover and address those risks on the very same information systems and assets where motivated intruders look on a daily basis.
There are several key benefits to this approach:
- Faster discovery of new vulnerabilities as they are introduced
- Continuous validation of security protections
- Lower exposure time for critical vulnerabilities
- Greater visibility into the organization’s attack surface
- Stronger alignment with evolving practices in risk management
By continuously testing their systems, organizations can develop a more accurate understanding of their current security posture and potential threats. Security teams can then prioritize remediation efforts based on the actual risk profile, rather than attempting to address all known weaknesses, including prior discoveries that may no longer be relevant or may have been otherwise remediated.
They are also able to quickly learn if security processes or protections put into place earlier remain working over time. This ‘checks and balances’ process ensures an overall stronger level of resiliency, making for a better security posture.
Developing a Security Approach in the New Realm of Cyber Threats
True cyber resilience requires an understanding that, despite the best-laid efforts to prevent threats and mitigate potential damage, the threat will continue and evolve, and new holes will eventually appear. The key is quickly identifying and addressing these holes before an adversary exploits them.
Continuous testing provides the information needed to truly address an issue. Regardless of how threats and vulnerabilities evolve, organizations can quickly adapt and ensure that they have a consistent and understandable context to both evaluate the current state of their security and reduce their attack surface.
As cybersecurity attacks become more intense and persistent, CPTaaS is moving rapidly from a ‘nice to have’ aimed at super-regulated environments to a must-have. Companies that take a CPTaaS approach are in a far better position to quickly learn about vulnerabilities, address them, and maintain the high level of cyber resiliency that is required in this new era of hyper-risk.