To Manage the Growing Attack Surface Remediate Those Exposures That Have a Higher Chance of Getting Exploited by Adversaries

Due to overreliance on technology, organizations are struggling to manage their attack surface, which keeps getting bigger and bigger. Exposures like vulnerabilities, configuration errors, counterfeit assets, or phishing-prone employees are like an open door for an adversary to get inside.

With the sheer volume of such exposures, it is not possible to patch or automate all of them at a given time.

Phase-wise exposure patching is the only feasible solution.

However, this can be tricky. Let's say that out of 500 exposures, you managed to patch 450, but the cybercriminal exploits the exposure from the remaining 50 and gains access to your organization's critical assets.

That’s why Gartner came up with a program called Continuous Threat Exposure Management to carry out phase-wise patching of exposure.

But what is CTEM ?

To explain in short, it is a cyclic program that has to be performed each time there is a big change in your organization, and its attack surface has changed.

A continuous threat exposure management program is a five-stage cyclical process that helps your organization strengthen its security posture over time. Its five stages are:  

• Scoping  
• Discovery  
• Prioritization  
• Validation  
• Mobilization

Among these five stages, the validation process has become crucial because from those 500 exposures, it will shed light on the ones that are truly exploitable and can be lethal for an organization if targeted by an adversary.  

The Core Objectives of the Validation Process

The validation process has five main objectives to fulfill:

• Will the cybercriminal truly exploit the specific exposure? This confirmation will help your organization prioritize which ones to focus on and which exploits are safe enough to be postponed later.  
• How will the adversary breach the organization? What route will they take to exploit the specific exposure? This will give your organization a complete picture of how the potential cyberattack will get carried out.  
• How effective do the security measures respond to the simulated cyberattack? Are they able to stop an adversary from exploiting the exposure?  
• How will it impact the organization if the adversary decides to exploit specific exposures when trying to reach its essential assets?  
• Is the proposed remediation feasible and efficient enough for the organization to implement?

By confirming all these, validation helps your organization prioritize its resources to fix those exposures that have a higher chance of getting targeted by cybercriminals. This will keep your organization prepared against cyber threats.  

Last year, Gartner, in its Hype Cycle for Security Operations report, highlighted adversarial exposure validation as an emerging technology for organizations to test and validate the security measures of an organization in front of an actual cyberattack.  

A Brief Explanation Of Adversarial Exposure Validation

Adversarial exposure validation combines automated penetration testing, breach and attack simulation, and red teaming to emulate real-world cyberattacks.

The goal of this framework is to test your organization’s cybersecurity posture by emulating an adversary’s tactics, techniques, and procedures that will not only help your organization identify exposures that exist within its on-premise and cloud environments but also how an adversary will exploit them to access its essential assets.  

AEV will identify gaps in your security measures by performing continuous real-time validation, which will be immensely useful in reducing them in the long term. Periodic assessments of exposures, like once a month, are a thing of the past.  

By focusing on those exposures that have a higher chance of exploitability, AEV will help your organization prioritize remediation. You will be able to optimize resource allocation based on insights from simulated cyberattacks.  

Continuous testing and validation are crucial now, as Infopercept’s 2025 threat report states that:

• Attackers will keep exploiting known exposures like unpatched systems and outdated software as they all feel familiar.  
• Adversaries will target application infrastructure and build pipelines as every organization, regardless of the industry, is investing in application development.  
• Gen AI is the latest arrow in an adversary’s quiver. They will use it to increasingly launch more lethal cyberattacks.  
• As organizations are adopting cloud technology, adversaries will increasingly look for ways to exploit the exposures and weaknesses that exist within the cloud infrastructure.

So, if you want your organization to stay one step ahead of cybercriminals in 2025, then performing adversarial exposure validation is a must. Our platform, Invinsense OXDR can do it for your business.  

Continuously Validate Your Organization’s Defence with Invinsense OXDR

Invinsense OXDR has consolidated various security tools to help your organization identify exposures that exist among its employees, processes, and technologies.  

Our platform supports adversarial exposure validation cybersecurity framework.

1) Invinsense Breach and Attack Simulations

Invinsense Breach and Attack Simulations simulate real-world cyberattacks to evaluate your organization's defenses and identify exposures within your security infrastructure.  

These simulations are aligned with the MITRE ATT&CK framework and use the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by cybercriminals.  

The continuous, automated assessment will help determine your organization's ability to detect, respond to, and recover from various attack scenarios. The actionable insights that you will get will strengthen your organization's security posture and shed light on how effectively your systems can withstand actual cyber threats.  

Here is what our platform covers through Breach and Attack Simulation:

• Smishing Attacks
• Vulnerable Employees Metrics
• Current Security Control Testing (DLP, Firewall, etc.)
• Data Exfiltration Check
• Email Phishing
• Email Whaling Custom Phishing Templates
• Training Modules
• Vishing Attacks
• SIEM Use case creation
• Provides visibility into the attack, strengths, and weaknesses of your defense mechanism.
• Assists in detecting and responding to adversary behavior
• Supports fine-tuning security policies and other components of your security setup
• Endpoint Testing
• SOC Team resilience check
• Use case testing

2) Invinsense RedOps  

Invinsense RedOps will assess your organization's security posture by launching actual cyberattacks using realistic attacker techniques. This evaluation will offer insights into your organization's readiness to handle a genuine attack and also highlight the areas that need improvement.  

By performing both offensive and defensive execution, RedOps improves the validation process through continuous and collaborative red teaming efforts. This proactive approach identifies exposures as well as potential future attack vectors.

3) Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART)  

Continuous Automated Red Teaming will automate the process of mimicking adversarial attacks, which will provide your organization with continuous exploitable weaknesses within your organization.  

Parting Thoughts  

As threats are evolving and cybercriminals are continuously refining their attack techniques, Organizations, too, will have to evolve in how they defend themselves from cyber-attacks. Continuous validation with Invinsense OXDR will validate your organization’s defenses to protect both on-premise and cloud infrastructure.

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