Critical observations from Penetration testing observations or bug bounty findings exercises often work against casts a bad light on blue teams and managed service providers handling network security and security operations. Clients often read those observations as an indication of the non-effectiveness of the services and can question the ROI from these managed services.

On the other hand, security assessment organizations and researchers are always focussed on identifying exploitable risks as their primary objective. Remediation of the vulnerabilities or empowering the blue and security operation teams in defending and responding to attack attempts against the discovered vulnerabilities sometimes takes a back seat.

The fact is that however good the security technology is or the resources managing it, attacks can still happen. The ever-changing nature of the attack surface makes defending a modern organization tricky since newer exposures appear on a regular basis. Ideally like in purple team assessments, the security assessment programs should work hand in hand with blue teams and security operation center teams to continuously measure and improve existing security controls and monitoring capabilities.

MSPs should operationalize security assessment intelligence for Cyber Threat Informed Defense

In security assessment programs, adversarial behavioral traces should be used for active or passive validation of security controls, proactive detection of future attacks, and instrumented or semi-automated response actions. The different characteristics identified in actual adversary actions should be used to validate the effectiveness of security controls, active and passive security assessments, and the development of continuous security monitoring strategies.

In real-world enterprise environments, security assessment observations are not always immediately remediated. Sometimes it may even take months, or it may never get remediated in some instances, where the risk is accepted due to business reasons. This means that attackers or adversaries can leverage these weaknesses or flaws directly or indirectly by chaining them with other vulnerabilities. The dependency on time, developers, and effort needed for remediating vulnerabilities often make the observations of no real value unless they can be used as intelligence for compensatory control fine-tuning and proactive monitoring. In other words, security assessments should aid the threat-informed defense practice by empowering blue teams with the intelligence needed for continuous security monitoring and effective incident response. This will significantly improve the value that security assessments bring in, instead of becoming an activity that adds more noise to the already known list of vulnerabilities.

By adding Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) service to their portfolio, MSPs and MSSPs can provide significant value to their customers by continuously improving their detection and response capabilities by leveraging the intelligence from these assessments.

About NST Cyber

NST Cyber pioneers proactive, AI-driven Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). Our flagship NST Assure CTEM delivers rapid threat assessment, continuous vulnerability prioritization, and automated responses while maintaining compliance. In a dynamic cyber landscape, we're dedicated to safeguarding digital assets and the operational integrity of our customers.

In an era where cyber-attacks are increasingly driven by sophisticated algorithms, more than relying solely on human-centric defense mechanisms is required.NST Assure Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) platform is uniquely positioned to fill this gap. Built on a cloud-based architecture, it utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate threat detection and response. Unlike traditional security solutions, the NST Assure CTEM platform evolves in real-time by learning from vast data, delivering dynamic insights into potential cyber threats, and enhancing organizational resilience.

With NST Assure, changes in your external attack surface are continuously monitored with an AI/ML-powered discovery process, and observations are validated near real-time and de-duplicated. Against the prioritized most relevant and essential observations from threat surface discovery, penetration testing is auto-triggered to validate the possibility of exploitation.

NST Assure's in-depth and comprehensive discovery process covers all channels like the Internet, Deepweb, and Darkweb.NST Assure also comes with vulnerability risk prioritization support and the ability to convert security assessment observations to Machine Readable Threat Intelligence (MRTI) bundles, which your SOC and network security team can use for proactive monitoring and defense of exploitation attempts.

NST Cyber helps enterprises across the globe actively discover and manage external security risks continuously with the NST Assure CTEM platform.