Why Your Pentest May Not Be Enough
In today’s rapid change, cybercriminals continuously refine their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to exploit vulnerabilities and evade detection. For organizations, ensuring that cybersecurity controls are both effective and adaptive is no longer a luxury but a necessity. This is where SynerComm’s Adversary Simulation (AdSim) services come into play, offering a cutting-edge approach to validating and fortifying your security posture against the attacks that matter most.
What is Adversary Simulation (AdSim)?
At SynerComm, AdSim represents more than just a penetration test; it’s a collaborative and iterative process designed to evaluate your organization’s cybersecurity controls through the lens of a real-world adversary. By systematically performing targeted attacks, AdSim helps identify control gaps and validate the effectiveness of your security controls against modern, in-the-wild exploits. AdSim focuses on the attacks that are relevant and impactful to your environment, providing tailored insights and actionable recommendations. In fact, many clients test improvements to their logging and control configurations during an AdSim so they can be immediately retested after the change.
To maximize effectiveness, SynerComm’s AdSim services are offered to clients who have recently undergone an internal penetration test with our team. This ensures that our pentesters are familiar with your environment and its controls, allowing them to conduct a thorough and meaningful simulation.
Business Benefits of AdSim
- Enhanced Risk Management: AdSim validates that specific controls are effective against known threats, both providing confidence (in what works) and helping your organization optimize remediation efforts.
- Collaboration & Training: AdSim fosters a collaborative environment, bringing together pentesters and defenders to align on strategies and share knowledge.
- Strategic Decision-Making: Gain a clear understanding of your organization’s security capabilities, enabling informed decisions about investments in technology and third-party services.
- Improved Compliance: Demonstrating the effectiveness of your controls through AdSim can assist with meeting regulatory and compliance requirements.
- Increased ROI on Security Investments: By identifying gaps and misconfigurations, AdSim ensures that your existing tools and solutions deliver maximum value.
Technical Benefits of AdSim
- Comprehensive Control Validation: Test your security controls against a variety of real-world attack scenarios, including advanced persistent threats (APTs) and simulated malware.
- Granular Insights into Control Gaps: Identify specific weaknesses in your logging, configurations, and alerting.
- Hands-On Learning for Defenders: Provide your security teams with the opportunity to monitor live attacks, analyze logs, and fine-tune responses in real time.
- Iterative Testing for Continuous Improvement: AdSim allows repeated testing of controls to validate improvements and refine configurations.
- Assessment of Third-Party Monitoring Services: Evaluate the effectiveness of external cybersecurity monitoring and incident response providers.
The AdSim Process
- Pre-Engagement Setup: Before an AdSim begins, SynerComm’s team collaborates with your organization to review the results of a recent penetration test and understand your current controls.
- Environment Familiarization: During an External to Internal Penetration Test, our pentesters study how your controls react to various tools and techniques, ensuring a realistic and meaningful simulation.
- Attack Execution: Leveraging the MITRE ATT&CK® framework as a guide, SynerComm’s team systematically performs attacks that mimic known APTs, malware, and other threats.
- Chained Attacks: Witness how combining several (sometimes less severe) attacks together can lead to data exfiltration or full domain compromise.
- Real-Time Collaboration: Throughout the simulation, defenders will monitor logs and alerts, gaining firsthand experience in recognizing and responding to specific attacks.
- Iterative Improvement: As control gaps are identified, attacks are repeated to test and validate improvements, fostering a continuous improvement cycle.
- Detailed Reporting and Debriefing: The AdSim is a technical extension of the pentest report where we demonstrate our findings and highlight your control strengths.
AdSim Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)
SynerComm’s AdSim services emulate the TTPs used by sophisticated adversaries, including but not limited to:
- Initial Access: Command-and-control, exploiting public-facing applications, or leveraging valid accounts.
- Execution: Using our expertise, methodologies and hacking tools to exploit vulnerabilities and perform attacks.
- Persistence: Establishing footholds via registry modifications or scheduled tasks.
- Privilege Escalation: Exploiting vulnerabilities or misconfigurations to gain elevated access.
- Lateral Movement: Utilizing tools like PsExec or RDP to traverse the network.
- Data Exfiltration: Simulating the exfiltration of sensitive data through various channels.
SynerComm’s AdSim ensures a structured and comprehensive evaluation of your security controls.
Why Choose SynerComm for AdSim?
AdSim is not just a service; it’s a partnership. At SynerComm, we work alongside your team to ensure that every attack, insight, and recommendation translates into tangible improvements for your organization’s security posture. For mature organizations, we can even tailor simulations to mimic specific threat actors or malware, providing a level of realism that is unmatched.
Take Action Today
Don’t wait for an attack to reveal the weaknesses in your defenses. Contact SynerComm today to schedule your next penetration test and take the first step toward integrating AdSim into your cybersecurity strategy. Together, we can ensure your organization is not only prepared, but resilient in the face of evolving threats.
