Using Breach & Attack Simulation (BAS) to Prepare Against Ransomware Attacks

Using Breach & Attack Simulation (BAS) to Prepare Against Ransomware Attacks

It’s no secret that headlines over the past 12 months have been riddled with “cyber attack” and “ransomware.” As companies add new tools to their security stack in a bid to improve their security posture, hackers continue to innovate and improvise ways and means of skirting around these new defensive tactics.

2021 saw the emergence of several new ransomware trends, including supply-chain attacks, double extortion and ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), to name a few.

It is expected that ransomware tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) will continue to evolve and be leveraged to target unpatched vulnerabilities and gain access to organizational networks to inflict maximum damage.

Fighting off these evolving ransomware threats requires organizations to employ several manual and automated defensive tactics and products, including vulnerability scanning, penetration testing and more. While these activities can provide point-in-time assessments, they cannot provide insights into an organization’s overall risk against ransomware threats, nor can they quantify the potential business impact of such threats or identify drift in security control configuration over time. So how can businesses that spend millions of dollars annually in securing themselves ensure that their investments are actually working? How can they generate consensus on security KPIs and other long-term security improvements, and minimize overall business risk against ransomware?

This is where Breach & Attack Simulation (BAS) tools can empower security teams by providing a continuous threat-based view of an organization’s potential risk across its enterprise environment.

Let’s understand how.

Step 1: Plan for the Worst

To begin, security teams should leverage threat intelligence to identify threats with the highest potential to significantly impact the organization’s security posture and risk tolerance. Additionally, it is important to correctly identify the organizational crown jewels (in the cloud, network or on endpoints) to ensure appropriate simulator deployments. This planned approach allows security teams to test the impact of specific threats and attack TTPs on critical assets across the organization and validate the security control configuration in the most effective manner.

By thinking like an attacker, you can identify what makes you an attractive target. Evaluating your strengths and weaknesses in full, in addition to what makes you unique to attackers, is the best way for security teams to test the impact of specific attacks on their organizations.

Step 2: Enter the Simulation

After you’ve identified the most relevant threats to your business, your breach and attack simulation tools can safely execute full kill-chain ransomware attacks in your production (or sandbox) environment. You will be able to visualize your current gaps and security misconfigurations and identify where reconfiguration and/or fine-tuning is needed. The results from these attack simulations provide your security team with actionable context to enhance their situational awareness, without introducing any risk to critical systems or actual production data.

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Step 3: Analyze and Secure

BAS tools enable security executives and stakeholders to develop a near real- time understanding of threats facing the organization, their potential impact and what is needed to minimize that impact. The result is a cohesive security team that’s on the same page in terms of overall goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) against ransomware or other advanced threats. Analyzing actionable results provided by BAS technology leads to recommendations for new security controls or for improvements to existing security control configurations. With this valuable and actionable intel, organizations can quickly improve the efficacy of the security operations center (SOC) and the overall threat response by reducing the mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR).

The bottom line is this: don’t wait until a security attack cripples your organization to analyze where the gaps are in your security stack. The continued surge in ransomware is a not-so-gentle nudge needed to underscore the importance of BAS tools. Now is the time for organizations to take initiative, understand their level of risk and implement a more proactive approach in defending their critical assets.