Offensive Security
Think like an attacker, deploying techniques to mimic cyber attacks.
What is Offensive Security?
With offensive security the objective is to think like an attacker would and view your organisation through their eyes.
The “bad guys” i.e. hackers will look for vulnerabilities in systems that they can exploit, so you should do the same using to proactively exploit your own security vulnerabilities. This Vulnerability Management approach finds weaknesses by using Pen Testing and Red Teaming, eliminating any guesswork around what may happen during an attack.
The goal is to eradicate security weaknesses that could be exploited before they are even discovered, identifying weaknesses using the same exploitation techniques as threat actors.
The goal of offensive security is to be a deterrent, using the insights gained to provide significant obstacles against potentials attackers.
What Are the Benefits of an Offensive Security Strategy?
Proactively Reduce Risk
Implementing offensive security can reduce the risk of a successful cyberattack. Actively prioritising vulnerabilities and testing the depth of any weaknesses will help a security team remediate security gaps before they can be exploited.
Build Stronger Defences
Offensive security not only uncovers new and emerging vulnerabilities but also tests how deeply they can be exploited, knowledge that enables security teams to reinforce their defences.
Increase Response Time
Practice makes “perfect” and learning the same tactics, techniques, and methodology of a real-world attacker helps reduce attack response time. Offensive security techniques use the same attacks a cybercriminal would use, which helps security teams anticipate, detect, contain, and respond faster to minimise damage.
Regulatory Compliance Management
Most industries, especially those dealing with sensitive health or financial data, have mandated standards over their cybersecurity measures. Offensive security like vulnerability management, penetration testing, and red teaming helps organisations proactively find weaknesses so they not only meet compliance standards, but safeguard consumer data.
Minimise Business Disruptions
Managing your attack surface proactively reduces the likelihood that a cyberattack will be successful. This prevents costly system downtime as well as compliance penalties and reputational damage. The right offensive security portfolio can save your security team valuable time too, improving their efficiency by prioritising tasks by risk so the team stays focused on what matters most.
Methods of Offensive Security
Vulnerability Management
At its core, vulnerability management is a proactive approach aimed at identifying, evaluating, and mitigating vulnerabilities within an organisation’s systems, applications, networks, and infrastructure. These vulnerabilities, often resulting from flaws in software, misconfigurations, or human error, serve as potential entry points for cyber threats ranging from malware attacks to data breaches.
Penetration Testing
Over the years, penetration testing has become an integral component of proactive approaches to security, evaluating and prioritising risk before breaches occur. Penetration testing allows you to see your security posture through the eyes of an attacker and how far they can go after a vulnerability has been discovered. After a successful pen test attempt, reports are generated with detailed information that can help any security team better protect that data and close those security gaps.
Red Teaming
Cyberattacks are rarely immediate or instantaneous. Once an attack path is found, it’s exploited, but it can take a malicious actor weeks or months to find what they’re looking for. During that time, they lay low and stay quiet, silently navigating your inner security system to access sensitive data. Red Teaming are an in-house team (or external consultant) of ethical hackers who continually try to by-pass an organisation’s defences to uncover vulnerabilities that might not be obvious and to see how well the organisation can detect and respond to these threats.
By utilising Red Teaming, an organisation can proactively address weaknesses in its security infrastructure before attackers have a chance to exploit them. In simple terms, red teaming is like a friendly “attack” to provide insights into an organisation’s security posture, flag areas for improvement, and develop a more effective security strategy.
Core Impact
This tool is targeted at pen testers and is an exploitation framework. This competes in a similar product category to Metasploit.
It is a workbench with a reporting engine, complete audit trail and exploits that massively speed up the work of a pen-tester. It includes network level exploits, phishing attacks and web application exploits, plus other tools like ransomware simulation.
Advanced Bundle - Core Impact & Cobalt Strike
Integrations with other Fortra solutions
Core Impact and Cobalt Strike are two powerful tools that help organizations assess the security of their environments. This PDF provides an overview of the key functionalities of each of these tools, their similarities, and how they can be used together to amplify your pen testing efforts.
Cobalt Strike
This is the industry-leading Command and Control (c2) infrastructure. This is used by most red teams (plus most malware) because of its power and EDR evasion technology.
Outflank Security Tooling (OST)
OST is a set of 20+ tools that perform things that red team members want to do.
These range from a Sharpfuscator (hides C# executables from AV/ERD), to Hidden Desktop (an OPSEC safe implementation of hidden Virtual Network Computing), to Stego Loader (embeds a payload in a picture file) and so on.
Several of the individual tools are discussed, with demos, click on this page.
The full set of tools is covered in this PDF, an OST summary sheet that you can download.