The traditional approach to purple team assessments, which is typically manual, presents several significant challenges. These methods consume an inordinate amount of time and resources making them expensive and less frequent than desired. More importantly, they are incapable of holistically analyzing the deluge of data generated during a purple team exercise, leaving potential issues unidentified.
With 300,000 new pieces of malware created and 23,000 DDoS attacks underway every day, ensuring the efficiency of your people, processes, and technology against these evolving threats is crucial.
Typical purple team assessments fall short in this regard, mainly focusing on technology response without offering a comprehensive measurement or analysis mechanism. They also fail to provide holistic recommendations for operational improvements. This is where SightGain adds a new dimension to purple team assessments, extending beyond just technology response. It integrates measurement, analysis, and recommendations of processes, analytics, automation, orchestration, and personnel responses into its assessments. The result is a more comprehensive, proactive approach that aligns with the requirements of the modern cybersecurity environment.
Organizations can emulate threats on a large scale across the MITRE ATT&CK framework and existing controls, measure results across people, processes, and technical systems, and receive prioritized recommendations for improving security. This is not just about doing more, but doing purple team assessments better and quicker with fewer resources by leveraging automation to its full potential.
The Benefits of Automating Purple Team Assessments
Automated threat testing and analysis enhance the completeness, efficacy, and efficiency of purple team assessments. With continuous threat exposure management, automation can be used to generate purple team outcomes across an organization’s entire security program. It unlocks the ability to assess not just technology that typical purple team assessments begin to address, but also the processes, automation, analytics, and personnel responses that an organization uses to respond to threats on a day-to-day basis. This approach not only stimulates the environment with emulated threats but measures the reaction to ensure threats are handled as expected and diagnose the causes when they don’t.
Real-time insights from automated purple team assessments help organizations understand weaknesses in their cybersecurity strategy, including the technology, processes, and people. With continuous monitoring for purple team assessments, you can quickly reduce the time between detection and remediation and continually refine your security strategy and adapt to emerging threats.
Automated purple team assessments can also provide on-demand reporting as new threats emerge or changes occur within an organization’s network configuration or security teams. New automated tests can validate the effectiveness of security controls and responses or uncover new vulnerabilities.
How SightGain Automates Purple Team Assessments
SightGain tests more than just technology. Live-fire testing in your production environment measures the holistic response to real-world threats from your people, processes, and technology. This approach provides the empirical data you need to make informed decisions about areas of non-performance. SightGain also goes beyond traditional threat exposure management platforms by identifying operational issues with the SOC or SecOps teams. When weaknesses are uncovered, SightGain provides individualized and interactive training to address specific concerns.
SightGain works by:
- Safely testing existing controls in production against real-world threats
- Measuring your tools, processes, analytics, automation, and analyst performance
- Analyzing the results of existing operations
- Prioritizing the list of performance issues to address
- Recommending the best solution to address security gaps and vulnerabilities
Just automating assessments, however, doesn’t get the job done. When your team still has to analyze the results and decide where to spend resources to address the gaps discovered, it can get complex quickly. For example, the MITRE ATT&CK framework tracks hundreds of attack techniques and thousands of variants. Purple team testing can often generate a long list of items to address that can quickly overwhelm the security team.
One big difference with SightGain is the automation of the entire testing, measurement, analytics, recommendation, and monitoring process to address the complexities of security operations. By streamlining the analysis, SightGain identifies and prioritizes the most impactful cybersecurity concerns. Often, the most important gaps are the ones that get missed by traditional methods. SightGian provides a risk exposure analysis that prioritizes your remediation efforts based on factors such as:
- The likelihood and severity of real-world threats
- Operational and business impact to your organization
- Data loss or downtime potential
- Organizational risk posture
With a prioritized analysis, you know which issues you need to address immediately to make actions more impactful. The results can also be used to refine operational playbooks that should be used to address threats more quickly.
How to Incorporate Automated Purple Team Assessments into Your Security Strategy
Integrating automated purple team assessments into your organization provides a holistic approach to cybersecurity. It takes coordinated collaboration to holistically improve your security posture across your security program.
Security leaders can take several steps to help improve results after deploying automated purple team technology:
- Audit current security infrastructure, test performance, and remediate operational gaps
- Prioritize recommendations based on resource requirements
- Implement selected fix actions
- Create a continuous feedback loop and clear communication flows
- Foster a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement
SightGain provides automated purple team assessments to operationalize MITRE ATT&CK simulations, prioritize any gaps that are uncovered, and provide actionable insights to improve the customer’s security environment. You can also tailor automated assessments to your organization’s specific operational needs.
Purple Team Assessment Automation for Resilience and Maturity
Automated purple team assessments equip your organization for the constantly evolving threat landscape, ensuring your team members are working at peak efficiency, and keeping your organization in compliance with regulatory, industry, and organization requirements. SightGain can also map purple team results to leading industry frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, NIST 800-53, CMMC, NIST 800-171, FFIEC, CBEST, ISO 27000, Zero Trust, and others.
By embracing assessment automation, organizations can significantly improve cybersecurity maturity and validate that security controls are tuned and configured optimally.
See SightGain in action. Schedule a one-on-one demo with the automated cybersecurity assessment and threat exposure management experts at SightGain.
Case Study: Learn how SightGain helps the U.S. Military improve response times to attack by 9X.
