CISA Reveals the Need for Continuous Offensive Security Testing

Waiting to respond to an attack often means reacting too late. Modern adversaries use increasingly sophisticated methods to bypass traditional defenses, leaving organizations vulnerable. The recent Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) red team assessment underscores the technical challenges organizations face in securing their infrastructure. Through advanced attack simulations, CISA's team successfully compromised critical systems, exposing gaps in detection and response strategies.

In this article, we will highlight the key lessons from CISA’s findings, and explain how continuous offensive security testing can fortify your organization’s defenses against real-world threats.

What CISA’s Red Team Assessment Revealed

CISA’s red team successfully compromised the domain and sensitive business systems of a critical infrastructure organization. Key takeaways included:

1. Over-reliance on Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): The organization’s reliance on host-based solutions left significant gaps at the network layer.
2. Lack of network layer protections: Insufficient segmentation and monitoring allowed attackers to move laterally and maintain persistence undetected.
3. Missed detection opportunities: Techniques like Kerberoasting, golden tickets, and lateral movement using stolen credentials bypassed existing controls.

These findings highlight the urgent need for continuous offensive security testing that simulates modern attack techniques.

The Case for Continuous Offensive Security Testing

While traditional security tools focus on defense, offensive testing validates your organization’s readiness to detect and respond to real-world attacks. Here’s why it matters:

• Simulate real attacks: Testing mimics adversary techniques such as command-and-control (C2) channels, reconnaissance, lateral movement, and data exfiltration.
• Expose hidden vulnerabilities: Identifying misconfigurations and gaps—like those in network segmentation or identity management—before attackers do.
• Enhance detection capabilities: Continuous testing helps fine-tune detection tools to catch techniques that evaded traditional defenses in the past.

How Vectra AI Helps You Stay Ahead

Vectra AI provides advanced solutions tailored to address the vulnerabilities highlighted by CISA's assessment:

Comprehensive Detection Capabilities

Leveraging our advanced detection mechanisms, Vectra AI identifies hidden threats across command-and-control channels, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. For instance:

• Detection of hidden tunnels, such as HTTP, DNS, and HTTPS-based tunnels, that adversaries use for covert communication.
• Monitoring for anomalous Active Directory operations, including replication requests indicative of DCSync attacks.
• Insights into privilege misuse, such as unusual account activity on hosts, enabling early detection of lateral movement.
• Identifies Kerberoasting and alerts on malicious Kerberos service ticket requests that could lead to the compromise of privileged accounts.

Offensive Security Services

The Vectra AI Offensive Security Hub is a collection of tools, resources, and protected environments to assess and test customers’ cybersecurity resilience as an organization and individual. Understand where your current defenses fall short and identify areas for improvement with our Offensive Gap analyses:

• Network Gap Analysis: Validate the resilience of your network controls against real-world attacker methods, including lateral movement, C2 setups, and data exfiltration.
• MAAD-AF and Halberd: Open-source attack emulation tools for cloud and identity gap analysis, simulating attacks across Azure AD, AWS, and other platforms with minimal setup.

Key Lessons for SOC Teams

From CISA’s findings, here’s what your team can implement today:

1. Adopt Network Detection and Response (NDR): Complement EDR with robust network monitoring to detect threats moving laterally or targeting network layers.
2. Continuous validation: Regularly test your defenses against MITRE ATT&CK techniques and refine detection rules.
3. Invest in training and resources: Equip your team with the tools and knowledge to identify and address evolving threats.

Adopt a Proactive Approach to Strengthen Your Security

The stakes are high, but the solution is within reach. By adopting a proactive approach to cybersecurity, organizations can shift from reactive defenses to resilient, adaptive strategies.

Through the Vectra AI platform, which leverages advanced detection capabilities like identifying Kerberoasting attempts, organizations can uncover gaps in their defenses and strengthen their response to modern attack methods.

By combining these detections with our offensive security services, we empower SOC teams to proactively test, validate, and enhance their defenses against sophisticated threats.

Take the next step: Watch our self-guided demos to see Vectra AI in action, or request a gap analysis to uncover vulnerabilities and strengthen your defenses now.