What Is Threat Emulation?

Threat emulation – also known as adversary emulation – is a cybersecurity defense strategy where professionals test their own network security defenses by emulating typical threat vectors.

Table of Contents

• Threat Emulation vs. Penetration Testing
• Benefits of Threat Emulation
• Automating Threat Emulation
• Create a Bulletproof Security Strategy with Perimeter 81

In 2023, the most prominent cyber threat faced by businesses was ransomware, followed by network breaches, which accounted for 19% of total detection capabilities. Working in cybersecurity means understanding that no business is invulnerable to actual attacks, but preparation against these real-world threats significantly reduces a business’s overall risk.

In this article, we’ll demonstrate why threat emulation is such an effective strategy to keep your business safe, outline the benefits of this strategy, and explore how to automate it to enhance its success in your business.

Threat Emulation vs. Penetration Testing

Threat emulation and penetration testing are commonly confused, even by cybersecurity professionals. After all, both of these strategies involve an internal cybersecurity team launching controlled, real attacks at their own business to try and test the strength of their current security posture.

The core difference between these two lies in their scope.

• Penetration testing is a much broader exercise, where a threat actor will attempt to break through company defenses using any strategy they’d like.

Pen testing is more of a training exercise, as it allows your blue team to identify a random cyber threat in real-time and launch defensive measures to put a stop to it.

• Threat emulation, on the other hand, focuses on threat simulation of a specific threat to your business. Your security team will already know what the threat is, and will just watch to see how it fairs against the organization’s defenses.

Based on that experiment, your team then adapts its security posture to perform better against this specific threat in the future.

Benefits of Threat Emulation

Threat emulation is a phenomenal strategy to incorporate into your common cybersecurity practice for a number of reasons:

• Secure Your Ecosystem: Test your defenses without the worry of actually harming your system.
• Improve Your Security Posture: Pinpoint weaknesses in your defenses ahead of time and patch them out or fortify them to create a better security posture.
• Automate Your Defense Strategy: Your team will be able to automate many aspects of threat emulation, creating a stronger security posture over time and with minimal manual effort.

By incorporating threat emulation into your business, you can regularly test out and push your cybersecurity defenses to their limits, discovering new weaknesses and areas you could improve upon.

Automating Threat Emulation

Another important aspect of threat emulation is to automate as much of it as possible. There are thousands of potential threats and millions of total attack vectors that your business could consider at any one time. Modeling all of them and testing out your defenses manually isn’t feasible.

Even the largest businesses in the world couldn’t deploy the resources necessary to truly conduct every single threat emulation plan manually.

Automation is a vital part of threat emulation as it allows a business to scale its defense testing without consuming additional human resources. There are several elements of threat emulation that a business can automate, such as:

• Checking whether defense software is up to date
• Identifying the active parts within a system
• Launching test attack scenarios

A good rule of thumb is that you can use a few members of your cybersecurity team to oversee different aspects of this automation. Instead of performing the tasks themselves, their role is to monitor the active automation of your systems and identify any bottlenecks or errors.

By adapting to overcome any errors in your automation, your business can continue to scale threat emulation efforts, actively making your business safer over time.

FAQs

What is threat emulation?

Threat emulation is a cybersecurity practice where businesses test their current cybersecurity infrastructure in a controlled environment against different common threats that they will likely experience in the future.

What is the difference between threat emulation and threat extraction?

Threat emulation is about creating a falsified threat that resembles a real one and seeing if it can break into your system. Threat extraction is a real cybersecurity process where you analyze content (like an email and its attached files), pinpoint malicious files, and remove it before it can do harm to your business.

What is adversary emulation planning?

Adversary emulation planning is another phrase that describes threat emulation planning. They are two terms that describe the same thing, relating to the testing of system defenses.

Are red teaming and threat emulation the same thing?

Red teaming and threat emulation both seek to improve the security posture of a business but do so in different ways. Red teaming is where a team of cybersecurity experts attempts to break into your system (without you knowing beforehand what strategies they will employ). Threat emulation focuses on the protection of one asset and the testing of the defenses in place for that system.