Enhancing Cybersecurity Resilience with Adversarial Simulation

Do you know 60% of small businesses shut down within 6 months of facing a cyber attack?

A report by Cybersecurity Ventures says that.

Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, attackers target everyone with advanced techniques and tactics.

Traditional security measures are no longer enough to beat threat actors. You need to cast a wider, stronger net to catch them and prevent them from harming your organisation.

Adversarial simulation is a proactive security measure that can help you improve your cyber security resilience. Let’s understand how with this article.

What Is Adversarial Simulation?

Adversarial simulation is a cybersecurity exercise that organisations conduct to test their cyber resilience framework against cyber threats, such as phishing, ransomware, DDoS, zero-day attacks, and more.

In adversarial simulation exercises, the evaluators mimic the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of real-world cyberattacks to make them look more realistic and challenging. It helps you find security vulnerabilities in your systems and network and understand how effective your current security controls are against advanced threats. This gives you a better idea of your organisation’s attack readiness.

An adversarial attack simulation includes these components:

Attack emulation: Evaluators mimic the TTPs of attackers to simulate an attack on your IT infrastructure.
Building realistic scenarios: Security teams gather the latest threat intelligence to build realistic scenarios to make the exercise difficult.
Incident response and recovery testing: Adversarial simulations assess how effective your incident detection and response plans are. They also test how fast and efficiently you recover your data and operations.

You can use the insights from adversarial simulation to prioritise risks based on their severity and resolve them faster. This helps prevent cyber attacks or reduces their impacts on your operations and bottom line. This way, you can improve your cyber security resilience and stay compliant with applicable laws and regulations.

Adversarial Simulation vs Traditional Penetration Testing

Adversarial simulation is similar to penetration testing as both check an organisation’s cybersecurity resilience. But they differ in many ways. Let’s find out how:

Types of Adversarial Simulation

Adversary simulations are of different types that you can conduct based on your security needs:

Red Teaming
A red team consists of ethical hackers who simulate cyber attacks and attempt to breach an organisation’s security. It’s done to test how the organisation withstands the attack. It’s also called an offensive team as they act like the enemy or the attacker.

Red teaming uses TTPs of cybercriminals, ransomware groups, APT groups, etc. to build scenarios that seem real. It reveals vulnerabilities and threats in your systems, so you can improve them quickly. It also evaluates human behaviours and a company’s physical security, so you get a complete idea of your digital plus physical security.

Purple Teaming
Purple teaming combines red teaming and blue teaming to conduct comprehensive security testing. The red team or offensive team prepares scenarios based on real-world attacks and the latest trends and attempts to breach an organisation’s security controls.

On the other hand, the blue team is tasked to prevent the breach. If the breach still happens, the blue team will detect and respond to the attack. It aims to reduce the impact on the organisation, recover data faster, and restore operations.

This exercise improves collaboration across departments and spreads cybersecurity awareness in your organisation. It also gives opportunity to people to share knowledge and respond with full power when a real cyber attack strikes.

Social Engineering Simulations
Social engineering simulations evaluate how prepared your employees are against phishing, spear phishing, baiting, and other social engineering attacks. Ethical hackers act as attackers and trick your employees with phishing emails or other techniques to gain sensitive data.

These exercises reflect whether your employees can understand the signs of social engineering attacks and refrain from performing the actions they desire. For instance, you can simulate a scenario where an attacker lures an employee with a hard-to-believe reward and asks them to click a link. If they do, the malicious program gets installed in the system and allows the attackers to access sensitive data.

DDoS Simulations
In a DDoS simulation, the ethical hacker or evaluator creates a where they flood your systems with excessive requests simultaneously than it can handle. As a result, the system becomes unresponsive and attackers can exploit it.

Conducting DDoS simulations in your IT infrastructure helps you understand how much load your systems and applications can handle at a time. It also helps you find hidden vulnerabilities and risks that you can resolve to prevent real attacks.

Breach and Attack Simulation
Breach and attack simulation (BAS) is another exercise that helps you determine how strong your defences are and find vulnerabilities in systems. It also mimics real-world cyber attacks like phishing scams and malware.

With a BAS exercise, you can figure out how effectively your security team can detect, respond to, and prevent data breaches and other cyber threats. It also exposes misconfigurations and weak security controls, such as poor authentication mechanisms, missed updates, delayed patches, and more. You can resolve these security issues in time before real attackers can exploit them.

Real-world attack example where adversarial simulation helped mitigate

Why Do Businesses Need Adversarial Simulation?

Every business needs to secure its IT infrastructure as cyberattacks leave no one. According to a World Economic Forum report, 72% of respondents reported that cyber risks have increased.

Cyberattacks, such as phishing scams, APTs, ransomware, zero-day exploits, and social engineering attacks keep targeting organisations. If they are successful, they can do severe harm – stealing data, hindering operations, exposing sensitive data to the public, and damaging your reputation.

According to an IBM report, the cost of a data breach in 2024 is US$ 4.88 million.

This is why it’s important for every business regardless of the size to use cyber security controls and measures, such as adversarial simulations. Let’s understand how adversarial simulations help businesses achieve cybersecurity resilience.

Tests Security Controls
Adversary simulations are based on real-world attacks, such as phishing, malware, DDoS attacks, insider threats, etc. They also use the same tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that real attackers do, making them realistic. This helps you test how your organisation’s security controls stand against attacks. Are they sufficient? If not, how bad?

You will be able to find weaknesses and risks deep-seated in your systems, cloud resources, endpoints, etc. and how attackers can exploit them. You can also test how strong your security tools and measures are, such as authentication mechanisms, access policies, firewall rules, etc.

Strengthen Defences
Adversarial simulation testing gives you useful insights, such as vulnerability details, systems at risk, missed updates/patches, and recommendations. You can use these insights to improve your organisation’s cyber defence. This means you actually get the upper hand over the attacker as you can detect and resolve vulnerabilities before attackers can find them. It helps you enhance your security and compliance posture.

You can also make better decisions about your current controls. For instance, replace risky or non-compliant third-party security tools with more secure ones. Conduct adversarial simulations periodically to keep on finding risks and improving your defences.

Improves Incident Response
Adversarial simulation testing helps you evaluate your current incident response planning. You can find issues, such as weak detection, poor threat prioritisation, inefficient access controls, delayed response and reporting, and so on.

For instance, you can build a scenario to find how much time it takes for your security team to detect and respond to an attack. You can measure key performance indicators (KPIs), such as time-to-response, time-to-detection, data recovery, etc.

The result from simulation exercises like the above can help you refine your incident response strategies. This aids in proactive threat detection and faster recovery from attacks.

Ensures Compliance
Data protection regulations, standards, and authorities, such as GDPR, NIST, HIPAA, SAMA, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 require you to meet their requirements. These regulatory bodies have strict rules and regulations to protect customer data as data breaches and attacks never seem to stop.

If you don’t comply with the regulatory standards applicable to your organisation, you may face lawsuits, lengthy proceedings, and penalties. All this tarnishes your reputation in the market as well.

Avoid these risks and maintain compliance by using preventive measures, such as adversary simulation testing. You can simulate compliance-related exercises to find gaps in your security and compliance posture and resolve them. This improves your compliance posture and saves you from penalties and legal trouble.

Greater Collaboration
Adversary simulation aims to improve security throughout the organisation and boost awareness among everyone. The reason is cyber attackers can target anyone or any device within the network.

Conducting adversary simulation exercises gives an opportunity for people from different departments to come together and collaborate. Whether they belong to the HR, accounts, marketing, or security departments, anyone can participate in the exercises. This promotes a security-first culture in your company and makes people stay vigilant against cyber threats.

How to Conduct Adversarial Simulation in Your Organisation

Now that you have some idea of what adversarial situations are and why you need them, you might be wondering how to conduct them in your organisation. Let’s talk about this in detail.

Set Testing Goals
First, you must figure out what you want to achieve with an adversarial simulation exercise.

To build better incident response planning?

To improve your compliance posture?

To test the effectiveness of your security controls?

Set the goal of your adversary simulation testing and then proceed with the next steps. You can also choose the type of simulation in this stage – red teaming, purple teaming, social engineering, BAS, DDoS, etc.

Collect Threat Intelligence
What sets adversarial stimulation testing apart from penetration testing and other assessments is that its simulated attack scenarios are based on real-world attacks. For this, you must gather threat intelligence that complements your testing objective.

For example, if you want to test your organisation’s defences against ransomware attacks you must collect intelligence about ransomware attacks, the latest trends, how the threat actors perpetrated the attack, the impacts of those attacks on victims, and so on.

Build the Attack Scenario
Once you have threat intelligence, use it to build an attack scenario. Design your scenario keeping in mind the test objective and make it look realistic. For this, you must mimic the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of the malicious actor from threat intelligence.

Take the same example of ransomware simulation. Note the TTPs used in different ransomware attacks to understand how they gained entry to the victim’s systems or network. Replicate the same in your scenario to give it a realistic appeal and make it challenging for the defence team to detect and mitigate the ransomware attack.

Conduct the Test
So you have all the ingredients ready to perform the adversarial simulation, now it’s time to finally conduct the test. Take the help of ethical hackers or any automated tools to launch the attack and evaluate your organisation’s cyber resilience.

Now, it’s upon the defence team to detect, respond to, and mitigate the threat.

Analyse the Response
Find out how much time your security team took to detect the attack and what tools and processes they used to do it. Also, check how effectively they were able to respond to the threat and restore your operations and data.

Apart from the technical aspects, you must also analyse the collaboration, coordination, and communication between teams.

Was there any confusion?

Were there any hiccups or conflicts?

Take into account the time they took to report the threat and submit the final report. This tells you if everyone has the right knowledge of their roles and responsibilities while reporting and responding to incidents.

This way, you can understand your incident response plan’s effectiveness and where you should improve. It also helps you improve communication and collaboration between different teams and team members. This ensures everything flows smoothly without hiccups or confusion when an actual attack happens.

Report and Retest
After the exercise is complete, you must document the findings in a report and use it to make necessary improvements. You can even use it to train your employees. Also, conduct adversarial simulations periodically for continuous security validation to improve your cybersecurity posture.

Improve Your security posture with Micriminder’s Adversarial Simulation

Microminder is a leading cybersecurity company in the UK and has been providing excellent services and solutions to businesses of all sizes for the past 4 decades. We help you improve your security posture with adversarial simulation testing services based on your company’s security needs.

Our security team goes into deep stealth mode to make adversarial simulation tests more effective and realistic to prepare you for cyber threats and detect vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure proactively. Here are some of the features as part of our adversarial simulation testing:
Threat intelligence-based simulations: We use the latest threat intelligence and industry trends to create simulations to prepare you for advanced threats.

Realistic scenarios: We emulate the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of real attackers to create scenarios that feel real.
Multi-layered testing: Microminder tests your security posture across multiple layers of your IT infrastructure – cloud resources, on-premises devices and endpoints, network components, and human factors.

Comprehensive reporting: You will get detailed reporting on security and compliance gaps, incident detection and response times, communications, etc. to give you the full picture.

Recommendations: We also provide customised strategies to improve your security controls, compliance status, incident response plan, and more.

Explore our Adversarial Simulation services