Dual Approach to Validation: Broad and Targeted Automated Penetration Testing

Cybersecurity practitioners face an uphill battle against ever-evolving threats. Tools like automated penetration testing and legacy vulnerability management programs aim to uncover vulnerabilities but can miss out without enough range, or the inability to find unpatchable exposures, like misconfigurations. 

Today’s tools can also fall short, offering broad findings through noisy emulation or disruptive actions without detailing the exploitable paths. This leaves practitioners weighed down in research cycles and tedious mitigation efforts. To combat sophisticated threats like lateral movement, and compromised credentials that can result in ransomware attacks. Security teams need technology that can prioritize critical exposures, identify what is exploitable, and save time. 

Security teams need a dual approach: one that combines broad coverage with targeted precision, providing a clear view and prioritization so they can address critical exposures.

Today, we are excited to share the new advancements Picus has made to evolve our automated penetration testing capabilities for our customers.  These additions allow us to bring security teams accurate, risk-free and on-demand or continuous testing within Picus Attack Path Validation (APV). 

With Picus APV, automated penetration testing and attack path mapping empower security operations teams to uncover critical vulnerabilities, prioritize exposures and short-list attack validated paths to be closed quickly.

Fishing with a Net or a Spear, why not both?

We believe broad and targeted strategies can have an outsized impact when used together. Automated penetration testing serves as the "net," and offers wide-ranging findings by casting a broad scope across networks to identify potential exposures. This approach offers comprehensive coverage and can identify a wide range of exposures and vulnerabilities across systems. 

In addition, attack path mapping acts as the "spear," targeting specific exploitable paths with precision and a stealthy approach; it can pinpoint and map the most critical entry and choke points that are exploitable by adversaries.  

With these two capabilities, automated penetration testing and attack path mapping in one product, security teams gain both broad visibility and actionable insights, empowering them to address threats more effectively, like lateral movement, data exfiltration, and domain admin account takeovers that can result in ransomware attacks and data breaches.

The Power of Picus Attack Path Validation

With this latest release, Picus Attack Path Validation (APV) will redefine automated penetration testing by combining accuracy, stealth, and continuous validation. 

New APV capabilities include:

Accurate and Stealthy Approach: Using a stable and evasive approach to testing, which can be initiated from any point within the network, we offer a stealthy solution that mimics real-world attackers. Picus APV delivers more accurate threat scenarios and attack paths with fewer false positives even in large network environments.

Risk-free implementation: Minimize the risk of unintended disruptions with the ability to prioritize operational stability. With streamlined and secure testing you can also safeguard critical systems without manual approvals.

Continuous and Autonomous: Schedule and run assessments in parallel to keep up with your environment. Additionally, once configured, APV can run on autopilot and automatically initiate and execute simulations continuously without requiring approvals for each exploit attempt. 

With Picus APV, customers can:

• Uncover Exploitable Vulnerabilities:
  Identify exposures that traditional vulnerability assessment tools cannot, providing a broader security view

• Prioritize Exposures:
  Offer context-aware prioritization of exposures based on user environments and attack paths together

• Map Critical Attack Paths:
  Create prioritized exposure paths, highlighting the critical validated weaknesses that require immediate attention

By focusing on key objectives organizations can also:

• Reduce Risk of Ransomware Attacks:
  Enables organizations to determine which files an attacker can locate and exfiltrate.

• Harden Active Directory Security:
  Mitigate weaknesses like password cracking and lateral movement that can enable an attacker to compromise Active Directory, and consequently gain Domain Admin access.

The Picus APV latest release will be available January 2025. If you would like to try a demo of Picus APV or are interested in being an early adopter please contact us.

In today’s complex threat landscape, security teams need more than just tools—they need solutions that provide clarity, precision, and actionable insights. The combination of automated penetration testingand attack path mapping enables teams to address broad vulnerabilities while focusing on the critical paths that pose the greatest risk.  

Picus is also a pioneer in Breach and Attack Simulation technology which can be used together with Picus APV to provide comprehensive Adversarial Exposure Validation for organizations ready for the validation and prioritization steps of the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework. 

To learn more about using validation and prioritization in your CTEM journey see the Blog: The role of Adversarial Exposure Validation in CTEM