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Best Practices for Simulating Cyber Attacks in Safe Environments

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Oct 24, 2024 - 3 min read
Best Practices for Simulating Cyber Attacks in Safe Environments

In today’s business landscape, it’s not a question of if you’ll be targeted by a cyberattack — it’s more a matter of when. That’s why it’s more important than ever to make sure you’re prepared. Having the right defenses in place is only part of the equation in that regard.

Your employees also need to understand how to use those tools, and more importantly, how to respond during a cyber incident. 

Cybersecurity simulation training is an excellent way for people to develop that understanding. Rather than having to hope they remember processes and policies during live events, they can practice in realistic attack simulations that replicate the actions of a real-world cyber threat without putting any of your infrastructure at risk. Here’s what you need to know in order to effectively deliver these simulations. 

Know Your Ecosystem

In order to create an effective cyber attack simulation, you need to know not only what you’re protecting, but what you’ll likely have to defend against. This means knowing not only the systems and devices in your environment, but also your most valuable assets. To that end, you’ll want to perform a full risk assessment — sort of similar to what you’d do during the technical due diligence process. 

The deeper your understanding of your ecosystem and its threats, the more effective your simulations will be. 

Understand the Different Techniques

There are a few different approaches you can take to running a simulated cyber attack:

  • Bringing in a group of professionals known as a red team to play the role of a sophisticated threat actor. 
  • Having a third-party expert attempt to breach your cyber defenses and uncover weaknesses, a process known as penetration testing.
  • Testing the knowledge and mindfulness of your employees through a social engineering test. 
  • Bringing together a red team with a group of defenders known as a blue team and having them work together on a simulation. 
  • Creating a sandboxed copy of your live environment for cyber range training
  • Employing artificial intelligence and machine learning for sophisticated, AI-driven security training. 

None of these techniques are mutually exclusive, and you could easily blend two or more of them in the same simulation.

Set Clear Objectives and Limitations

It’s incredibly rare for a business to suffer multiple attacks from different threat actors at the same time. As such, you should develop each of your security simulations with a single goal and a clear scope. For each simulation, you’ll want to determine the following:

  • What systems and assets are involved? 
  • What kind of attack or threat are you simulating? 
  • What actions are acceptable during the simulation? 
  • How will you quantify the simulation’s success? 
  • How will you collect and analyze data during the simulation? 
  • What is your follow-up plan after the simulation?

Some of the threats your organization might simulate include, but are not limited to, social engineering, cloud-based attacks, ransomware, web-based attacks, and compromised accounts.

Embrace Continuous Learning

Arguably the biggest mistake you can make where cybersecurity is concerned is to treat it as a project with a clear endpoint. It’s not. Just as your business’s threat landscape is constantly evolving, so too must its cyber defenses. 

Similarly, cybersecurity training needs to be an ongoing process. And not just for your employees, but also for your team. No matter how effective your training may be, there’s always a chance to make it better — and you should always be on the lookout for such opportunities.

Adopt a Collaborative Approach

The days when cybersecurity was the exclusive domain of IT are well behind us. These days, security is everyone’s responsibility, from the highest-level executive down to the newest intern. It’s therefore crucial that you involve stakeholders from all areas of your organization in your simulations. Moreover, your cybersecurity simulations should be integrated with your incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans. It’s not enough to know how you’re going to stop a cyberattack. You also need to know how you’ll recover from one.

Learn More About Cyber Range Training and Simulations

Now that you’ve got some idea of what’s involved in running cybersecurity simulations, let’s talk about some of the technology you’ll need in order to support them. Check out Cyber Range Training And Simulation With Cloud-Based Technologies. You can also read a bit more about what a cyber attack simulation exercise specifically involves.