Extending Security Validation To The Cloud With Attack Simulation

With rising cloud adoption, practically every security team now faces the challenge of securing workloads in AWS, Azure, or GCP.

But as the growing number of cloud breaches demonstrates, this challenge is far from easy. The dynamic and complex nature of cloud computing, confusion over the scope of customer responsibility for cloud security, and a shortage of professionals with cloud expertise mean it can be difficult to stay on top of risks and be confident that controls are protecting workloads as expected.

Misconfigurations and overly permissive identity and access management policies remain the two leading causes of cloud breaches, and, in most cases, human error or oversight is the cause.

Why CSPM is not enough

In order to proactively identify and address cloud-based risks, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) have become established practices for security teams. However, to take cloud security to the next level and further reduce the risk of incidents, organizations must go beyond simply scanning cloud environments for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. 

Cloud attack simulation, to validate that cloud configurations are effective and to help security teams enhance awareness of the potential impact of cloud breaches, is now vital to increase assurance and prioritize risks more effectively.  

Introducing Cloud Security Validation

To alleviate the strain of cloud security and enable security professionals to be more confident about an organization’s cloud posture, Picus is delighted to announce the release of Cloud Security Validation (CSV).

CSV extends the security validation capabilities of The Picus Complete Security Validation Platform from on-premises environments to the cloud, providing the ability to identify and validate risks proactively. The product is comprised of two licensable modules:

• Cloud Security Audits

Identifies cloud misconfigurations, such as open data storage, cryptographic failures and excessive user privileges across core cloud services.

• Cloud Attack Simulation

Simulates cloud attack scenarios to identify excessive user privileges and how attackers could exploit these to perform privilege escalation and compromise cloud services.  

The value of cloud-native attack simulation

By gathering cloud resources and using this data to execute real-life cloud attack scenarios, Cloud Attack Simulation goes beyond the capabilities of CSPM and CIEM tools.

Want to understand what an attacker with initial access to your cloud environment could do to access critical services and data? In minutes, Cloud Security Validation will help you identify any IAM policies that could be abused to allow privilege escalation and facilitate an objective being achieved.

Identify and respond sooner

Unlike other cloud tools, which can be tricky to deploy, have a steep learning curve, and make it difficult to make prioritized decisions about where to focus attention, CSV helps security teams to identify risks swiftly and effectively. Fully agentless, it provides actionable insights, criticality scoring, and mitigation recommendations to address misconfigurations and vulnerable users.

For Picus customers currently leveraging Breach and Attack Simulation to validate security controls and map attack paths in on-premises environments, CSV helps make the next step in managing threat exposure more comprehensively across the expanded attack surface.

And for users currently using a CSPM or CIEM product, either from a third party or cloud provider, CSV provides the capability to validate its effectiveness from the perspective of an attacker.

Learn more

To learn more and see for yourself the benefits of attack simulation in the cloud, please reach out to us and request a demo.