Case Study | Advanced Playbook for Security Effectiveness Validation by an Internet Giant

Executive Summary

Under Gartner's authoritative definition, Cybersecurity Validation has become an indispensable activity in security management. Enterprises across different industries and scales have security validation scenarios that correspond to their current status. The security validation practices of a high-level security team from a certain internet giant can provide further inspiration to other client-side enterprises and security vendors.

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Security Validation:

Evolving from a Mainstream Trend to an Inevitable Path

In April 2023, Gartner released its top 9 cybersecurity trends, in which Cybersecurity Validation was authoritatively defined:

Cybersecurity validation is a convergence of techniques, processes and tools used to validate how potential attackers could exploit an identified threat exposure, and how security defense systems and processes actually respond. Blue and red team tools are merging into highly customized and flexible intrusion tools to more effectively test the organization's defenses, including the efficacy and configuration of security controls and monitoring tools. The resulting validation outcomes make cross-team decision-making easier and help organizational leaders allocate resources.

Gartner

In the same report, Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), which ranked first, also mentioned the necessity of security validation. In October of the same year, CTEM was once again selected as one of Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends for 2024. In CTEM's five-step closed-loop framework, Validation is listed as the most critical step prior to Mobilization.

Whether as a client-side enterprise or a security vendor, substantially improving automated security validation capabilities will be an absolute necessity in the future.

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Security Validation Runs Through the Entire Lifecycle of

Enterprise Security Operations Development

Regardless of enterprise size or industry, security must be validated.

Although cybersecurity has gradually gained attention in recent years, the level of cybersecurity defense among various types of enterprises remains uneven due to differing industry characteristics, enterprise scales, and development stages.

In fact, at each stage of the development of enterprise security defense maturity, there are corresponding security validation methods.

For enterprises at the entry-level stage of security defense, validating the capabilities of basic security products helps them select appropriate basic security products and resolve common O&M issues. Enterprises can also test their capability to respond to external attacks through boundary validation provided by CyberSecValidation.

Enterprises that have completed basic security construction can enhance their threat detection and response levels through the CyberSecValidation platform. With the help of different attack scenarios, they can validate their incident response capabilities, refine alert granularity, and solve the alert fatigue issue. These enterprises need to solve problems through rich Use Cases; CyberSecValidation can help them create Use Cases to improve detection efficiency and accuracy.

As for enterprises with a high level of security, security validation can help them test personnel traceability capabilities and platform automated response capabilities. By reconstructing real and complete cyber kill chains and outputting intelligence, it helps the Blue Team achieve a closed-loop validation. In addition, enterprises with strong security defense capabilities and high-level security teams often have more perspectives from which to maximize the utilization of security validation.

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How High-Level Players Leverage Security Validation to Create Value

The financial industry and the internet industry typically demonstrate outstanding capabilities in cybersecurity. As the core carrier of capital flow, the financial industry's massive scale and highly sensitive business nature make it a primary target for cyber attacks. The internet industry acts as a bridge connecting the world, investing massive resources into the R&D and practice of cybersecurity technologies to ensure the safety and reliability of its own business operations.

A certain internet giant reached a cooperation with CyberSecValidation in the previous year, fully utilizing security validation to realize diversified value. The group deployed dozens of validation agents to cover all designated areas. After nearly a year of continuous validation, the final identification rate of the group's self-developed security products rose from 50% at the beginning to over 90%, vigorously surpassing the average level of mainstream security products currently on the market.

CyberSecValidation became a partner of this group after undergoing rigorous screening by the group's high-level security team. The 12000+ attack techniques, 1500+ attack scenarios, and 300+ tracked APT groups provided by CyberSecValidation are all genuine and actionable.

The classification method of attack techniques based on the ATT&CK framework, which is primarily promoted within the CyberSecValidation platform, also fully aligns with the group's needs. The emphasis on the attacker's perspective enabled CyberSecValidation to reach a deep consensus with the group, achieving a high level of automation through integration with its existing platform via highly flexible APIs. The group's effective utilization of security validation is also worthy of reference and learning for more large enterprises and security vendors.

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Security Effectiveness Validation Case Study of a Leading Internet Group