Rethinking Cloud Security Strategies with Adversarial Exposure Validation

The scale and complexity of modern cloud environments is rapidly transforming the threat landscape, further challenging traditional cybersecurity approaches. Compliance-driven security practices struggle to address real-world threats effectively, and offensive security testing strategies are too slow and infrequent to provide the cadence that tackles adversaries.  Overcoming these challenges requires technological and cultural shifts, and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) provides a solid foundation for these shifts. 

AEV hinges on leveraging the attackers’ perspective with structured, continuous security practices to prioritize validated exposures rather than chasing unimportant vulnerabilities. A key advantage of AEV is that it simplifies the adoption of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), a critical capability for modern organizations. Furthermore, AEV  transforms security operations into an agile capability that frustrates attackers while keeping organizations safe and resilient. 

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Security Enlightenment: The Attackers’ Perspective 

Understanding cloud infrastructure from an attacker’s viewpoint is essential for identifying and addressing exploitable gaps. Attackers do not respect or consider compliance achievements; they exploit tangible vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and weaknesses. Hence, while compliance provides foundations for building cybersecurity baselines, organizations should strive to grow beyond these basics to be better prepared for the harsh realities of the threat landscape.  The attackers’ view enables security teams to evolve from reactive to proactive defense strategies, thus enabling practical readiness for threats. Combining defender and attacker perspectives empowers security teams to have more realistic and actionable visibility of their security posture.  

Leveraging the attackers’ perspective is the core of Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), which empowers organizations to focus on exploitable rather than reported vulnerabilities. By emulating real-world attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), AEV exposes weaknesses before adversaries can exploit them, ensuring security measures are both relevant and actionable. 

The Limitations of Traditional Security Approaches

The most commonly adopted security strategies, like compliance audits, periodic penetration testing, vulnerability management, etc, fall short of addressing contemporary cloud security challenges. Key limitations include:

• Superficial Coverage: Static security tests often miss contextual vulnerabilities specific to cloud environments. These tests mainly focus on the external attack surface, but the internal attack surface is equally important. Most cloud attacks start with compromised credentials, bypassing the external attack surface; hence, there is a need to not just focus on the external preventive measures but also continuously check that the detective and recovery controls are functioning as expected. For example, identity-based attacks accounted for 75% of successful cloud attacks in the last year. These attacks commonly bypass preventive controls and are hardly tested during penetration tests.
• False Sense of Security: Compliance-focused strategies may check regulatory boxes but fail to consider the continuous nature of attacks. Attackers do not check an organization's compliance credentials before attacking; they identify and explicitly express the weak points. Hence, narrowing the focus on compliance could lead to a false sense of security. 
• Lack of Continuity: Security assessments (penetration testing, red/purple teaming, etc.) are conducted periodically, e.g., annually, bi-annually, and quarterly. This testing cadence does not match the reality of the threat landscape, where infrastructure is continuously under attack. Aside from the threat of malicious activities, the dynamic nature of changes due to deployment, etc., nullifies the validity of the previous security tests. Consequently, these periodic assessments allow attackers to take advantage of windows of opportunity.
• Traditional Vulnerability Management: Most vulnerability management systems chase reported vulnerabilities with the highest CVSS scores. These vulnerabilities are prioritized, but attacks still occur successfully since such prioritization methods are, at best, distractions from the main security issues. Security teams can focus on the correct problems and avoid alert fatigue with proper environmental context and proof of exploitability. 

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Adopting CTEM for Enhanced Cloud Security

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) offers a structured, proactive framework for identifying, assessing, and mitigating threats. Unlike periodic assessments, CTEM is ongoing and iterative. It ensures that organizations identify and fix the security issues that matter the most rather than chasing all vulnerabilities. Furthermore, CTEM emphasizes validating the efficiency of the most critical security issues, fixing these issues, and validating the efficiency of the remediation efforts. Organizations adopting CTEM can move from reactive responses to a proactive, threat-informed defense posture.

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Adversarial Exposure Validation

Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) is a technology category Gartner introduced in the Hype Cycle for Security Operations 2024. Gartner defines AEV as “the process and supporting technologies delivering consistent, continuous, and automated evidence of the feasibility of various attack scenarios.” AEV uses simulations and real attack techniques to empirically show how attackers could exploit identified exposures regardless of implemented security controls and processes. You will notice now that several technologies, e.g., Breach & Attack Simulation, autonomous penetration testing, and red teaming, have been traditionally used for the purpose mentioned earlier. However, these approaches are often clunky, difficult to manage, and focused on vulnerabilities rather than exposures.  AEV aims to remove these limitations by leveraging modern technologies, e.g., SaaS, focusing on exposures, maximizing automation, and integrating with security controls to show their gaps. Ultimately, AEV facilitates CTEM programs, empowering security teams to be efficient, agile, and highly productive.

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The Mitigant platform was developed based on the above-mentioned principles from day one, hence the natural fit. For example, assessment reports from Mitigant CSPM are ingested and used as the basis for recommended attack emulations. When executed, the recommended attacks demonstrate the exposures attackers could leverage to compromise the cloud environment. This approach directly validates the efficiency of the CSPM and provides a tangible understanding of the impact of a real security compromise that leverages the detected gaps.

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Mitigant Supercharges CTEM Programs with AEV

Organizations can seamlessly implement a CTEM program using Mitigant. Security validation has been our DNA from the beginning. Some people need help grasping why our platform combines security posture management (CSPM and KSPM) with adversary emulation, given that this approach is still uncommon. Our position as the pioneers of the Security Chaos Engineering discipline affords us strong proficiency in safely orchestrating real attacks, observing/analyzing the impact on the target systems, and providing reliable countermeasures.  Through the lens of the five steps that constitute a CTEM program, let's understand at how Mitigant supercharges the implementation of CTEM programs.

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Scoping

The first step in a CTEM program is to understand the organization’s attack surface. Scoping involves establishing an inventory of all assets and keeping a living record that can be used to verify the attack surface. Mitigant provides a detailed inventory of cloud and Kubernetes environments using Mitigant CSPM and KSPM, respectively. Additionally, the advanced drift detection feature tracks changes in the cloud and allows organizations to react quickly when these changes are malicious or suspicious. Read more about the Mitigant Drift Management Lifecycle in this blog article. 

Discovery

One mistake several organizations need to correct is mixing up scoping and discovery. Discovery goes beyond asset management; it emphasizes the need to understand the risks of the assets, including misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Mitigant runs comprehensive, automated security and compliance assessments against cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure to discover risks, including compliance posture against several industry benchmarks, e.g., CIS, NIST, PCI DSS. The reports of these assessments allow teams to make informed risk management decisions.

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Prioritization

Security teams are overloaded with alerts reporting on detected vulnerabilities, weaknesses, etc., which are difficult to fix due to time and resource constraints. Therefore, focusing on the most critical vulnerabilities is essential. One approach is to prioritize the detected vulnerabilities. Mitigant automatically prioritizes vulnerabilities using the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), CISA KEV (Known Exploitable Vulnerabilities) catalog, and Threat-Informed Defense.

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Validation

The validation step is a key differentiator between the Mitigant Platform and other vendors offering CSPMs, CNAPPs, KSPMs, etc. This step evaluates the efficiency of implemented security controls, security mechanisms, and architectures. It’s about proactively conducting security tests across the possible attack paths and ensuring the implemented security measures can effectively and quickly prevent attacks from succeeding. The Mitigant Cloud Attack Emulation is an agentless adversary emulation system that allows security teams to perform different kinds of security validation approaches, including Breach & Attack Simulation (mostly emulation), autonomous penetration testing, and autonomous red teaming. All the attacks are based on MITRE ATT&CK and MITRE ATLAS (for the attacks against GenAI ).

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Mobilization

The mobilization CTEM step focuses on the need for clear and proper communication between the stakeholders to enhance a common understanding of the processes and procedures required to remediate security issues. The Mitigant Platform integrates with several collaboration tools to facilitate easy mobilization, e.g., email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, DefectDojo, and Atlassian Jira. With these integrations, notifications of assessment reports are immediately disseminated to the appropriate stakeholders for their immediate action and awareness.  

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Leverage the Mitigant Platform for AEV Capabilities

Organizations are increasingly faced with novel attacks, and traditional cloud security approaches must address these threats more effectively.  New security strategies like AEV allow organizations to view their infrastructure from the attacker's perspective, a powerful, effective means of getting into the attacker's head and thwarting their strategies. Ultimately, AEV simplifies CTEM implementation and empowers security operations to become more agile, effective, and performant, leading to higher security and resilience based on evidence-based approaches. The Mitigant platform provides a state-of-the-art AEV that organizations of any size can leverage to understand and remediate exposures long before attackers become aware of these gaps. 

Let’s redefine cloud security together. Sign up for your free trial today - https://www.mitigant.io/en/sign-up

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