Cybersecurity is a moving target. If you’re purely playing defense, you’re always running to catch up.
That’s why cybersecurity leaders are increasingly incorporating proactive strategies in their security programs. They’re constantly on the lookout for vulnerabilities, early signals of attack, and innovative solutions to reduce risk.
Offense finds the gaps. Defense closes them. Strong cybersecurity teams use both.
Examples of defensive and offensive cybersecurity strategies
Defensive strategies are designed to prevent an attack from happening and detect those in progress so you can respond quickly, mitigate the damage, and quickly go back to business as usual.
Traditional cyber practices, including updates such as software and server patching, virus checkers, and vulnerability testing are all defensive strategies. So are many identity security best practices, such as multi-factor authentication, limiting access according to the Principle of Least Privilege, and monitoring identities and user behavior.
In contrast, offensive cybersecurity strategies are focused on discovery, exploitation, and testing resilience.
Risk assessments are effective offensive cybersecurity tools because they force you to take a hard look at scenarios that could likely happen to your organization, such as a ransomware attack, and detail the potential systems, data, and business processes that would be impacted and the consequences for your business.
Red teaming is another prime example of an offensive cybersecurity strategy.
It’s a goal-based adversarial testing process that evaluates the ability of your people, processes, and technologies to withstand a targeted attack. It demonstrates how threat agents could achieve their goals such as stealing data, siphoning funds, or otherwise causing harm to your business. This is done by exploiting vulnerabilities together in a composite attack just as real-world attackers do.
In a red team exercise, offensive security teams conduct live-fire exercises defined to mirror the potential actions of a real-life threat actor. They show how threat actors could achieve their goals such as stealing data, siphoning funds, or otherwise causing harm to your business. This is done by exploiting vulnerabilities together in a composite attack just as real-world attackers do.
Red teams can abide by rules of engagement that you set in advance so they don’t do any permanent damage. Meanwhile, a team of defensive cybersecurity experts—the blue team —works to combat the threats.
Red Team activities typically include:
- Identity-based attacks
- Application penetration testing
- Network penetration testing
- Social engineering techniques, such as phishing
This composite attack approach chains together seemingly separate or cross-domain vulnerabilities to reveal how hackers can leverage the trust relationships between systems, software, and people to compromise your network and access your most sensitive assets.
Red teaming requires a different set of workflows and skills than traditional cybersecurity teams may have in-house. You can build a red team inside your own organization, or partner with a third-party firm that specializes in red teaming.
Once you know where the gaps are, you can reverse engineer your defenses, prioritizing the security activities that will be most effective to close them.
How to go on the offensive
The first step to incorporating offensive cybersecurity strategies is changing your mindset. You want to think like a threat actors.
Learn all you can about their strategies, like how they leverage the identity attack chain, and tools they use for executing different hacking attacks, such as ransomware and phishing attacks.
Taking part in cybersecurity communities, both in person and via Slack or Discord, and reading the latest guidance from the Center for Internet Security and other cybersecurity organizations keeps you informed about the latest attack tools and techniques.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard from my cybersecurity peers is to earmark some time and budget for testing new solutions. Make it a priority and set up a structure for your team to bring in fresh ideas on a regular basis. Some organizations even have dedicated people whose job it is to meet with emerging vendors and test out new cybersecurity solutions with pilot programs.
As a next step, put out a challenge to your team: Ask them how they can become more proactive and to stay one step ahead of the threats.