What is Automated Security Validation?

What is Automated Security Validation?

Automated Security Validation (ASV) is the process of automatically verifying the effectiveness of your security procedures and controls in preventing cyberattacks. Enterprises leverage it to ensure that security programs are properly implemented and functioning as intended, reducing the risk of exposures and breaches. 

Automated Security Validation encompasses a variety of disciplines, including validating the exploitability of exposures in your environment, monitoring your security controls, penetration testing, and compliance checks, all performed continuously and consistently. Automated Security Validation solutions add an adversary’s perspective of exposures in an organization’s network to help security teams identify exposures that should be fixed first and minimize remediation efforts around exposures that are not exploitable in your environment. By automating these tasks, organizations can achieve continuous security resilience, identify potential security gaps in real-time, and address them promptly.

The Key Components of Automated Security Validation

Continuous Exposure Validation

Continuous exposure validation enables you to take the adversary’s perspective to verify whether vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and identity and access exposures are exploitable in your environment and should be immediately fixed. These tools simulate cyberattacks or run automated penetration testing to confirm the effectiveness of security controls in your environment and to identify where an attacker can actually compromise your critical assets and what exposures must be fixed to prevent it. 

While many of these tools operate at a point-in-time and may focus only on a specific segment of your infrastructure, it is recommended to run exposure validation continuously across your hybrid environment (across on-prem and cloud, external and internal attack surface) to avoid blind spots where you may be exposed. By highlighting expotable exposures and filtering those that are not exploitable in your environment, you can increase security and also boost efficiencies for your security and operations teams.

Security Controls Monitoring 

Security controls monitoring enables you to verify that your security controls are effective and operating as intended. This involves monitoring various security solutions, such as firewalls, EDRs, and access control. Continuous and automated monitoring of security controls doesn’t only reduce risks of a cyberattack, but also justifies your growing investment in cybersecurity tools by identifying and fixing configuration drift in real time. 

Security Policy Validation

Automated security policy validation involves the use of tools to ensure that policies are correctly applied and adhered to across an organization’s IT infrastructure. These tools can continuously monitor compliance with established security policies, detect deviations, and trigger alerts or corrective actions when necessary. By automating this process, organizations can maintain a consistent security posture and quickly respond to policy violations, thereby minimizing risks associated with non-compliance.

Remediation Validation

Trying to fix endless lists of vulnerabilities and exposures is often unrealistic, resulting in high risk, inefficiencies, and ongoing frustration and friction between security and operations teams. Resolution has to start with filtering and prioritizing the list of required fixes, but also with providing clear guidance and alternatives for how to achieve it and validate the effectiveness of remediation in reducing risk. By closing the loop of mobilization, security teams get the confirmation that the fix was applied as requested, improving security posture and resolving friction.

The Benefits of Automated Security Validation

Continuous Security Resilience

One of the key benefits of automated security validation is the ability to achieve continuous security resilience. Automated tools can operate around the clock, continuously monitoring the IT environment for security issues and ensuring that security controls are effective. This proactive approach allows organizations to stay ahead of emerging threats and ensures that they address vulnerabilities and exposures before they can be exploited by attackers.

Improved Efficiency

Automated security validation significantly improves the efficiency of security operations by reducing the time and effort required for analyzing and remediating exposures that are not exploitable. Automated tools can perform tasks such as vulnerability scanning and compliance checks quickly and consistently, enabling organizations to identify and address security issues faster. This increased efficiency allows security teams to focus on higher-priority tasks, ultimately enhancing the overall security posture of the organization.

Cost Savings

Automated security validation can lead to significant cost savings for organizations by reducing the need for manual security assessments and minimizing the impact of security breaches. Automated tools perform security testing more efficiently and accurately, reducing the likelihood of errors and false positives. This can result in lower operational costs and reduced spending on remediation efforts. Additionally, security policy validation helps automate and streamline audit readiness and avoid audit penalties. 

Continuous Compliance

Compliance with regulatory requirements and industry standards is a critical aspect of modern cybersecurity. Automated security validation tools can help organizations maintain compliance by continuously monitoring and validating their adherence to security policies and regulatory requirements. These tools generate automated compliance reports, providing organizations with the necessary documentation to demonstrate their compliance efforts to auditors and regulators. 

Resolving Friction Between Teams

Security and operations teams share the responsibility of fixing the right exposures to reduce risk. Endless lists of vulnerabilities and exposures with no context or guidelines leads to frustration and lack of confidence that increases friction between the teams. By filtering exposures that are not exploitable in the environment and prioritizing those that have the biggest impact on risk, teams can align on justification, guidelines and alternatives for remediation. In addition to that, verifying that fixes were applied as intended and reduced cyber risk builds cross-department confidence and collaboration.  

In Summary 

Automated security validation is a critical component in modern cybersecurity strategies. As cyber threats continue to evolve, embracing automation in security validation ensures that organizations can proactively manage risks and protect their valuable assets effectively. It’s not a surprise that validation is an essential component of the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework. When security validation is integrated with Exposure Assessment capabilities (discovery across the hybrid environment, prioritization, and mobilization) it helps organizations adopt CTEM and boost security and efficiency with a consistent, actionable remediation plan.