{"id":15284,"date":"2025-12-08T07:02:36","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T07:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newestek.com\/?p=15284"},"modified":"2025-12-08T07:02:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T07:02:36","slug":"offensive-security-takes-center-stage-in-the-ai-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newestek.com\/?p=15284","title":{"rendered":"Offensive security takes center stage in the AI era"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sara Madden<\/a> is looking to take a more offensive approach to safeguarding her company.<\/p>\n

The Convera CISO wants to add a red team to stress test the financial services company\u2019s systems and identify where defenses should be bolstered. She also wants to incorporate purple teaming<\/a>, where red and blue teams collaborate to improve overall security.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think offensive security is a place we need to get to, because [we] can use the information obtained from it to fine-tune the security program and controls,\u201d Madden says.<\/p>\n

Madden is not alone in her desire to add an offensive program to advance her cybersecurity strategy.<\/p>\n

Enterprise security\u2019s remit is defensive in nature: to protect and defend the company\u2019s systems, data, reputation, customers, and employees. But CISOs like Madden have been increasingly adding offensive components to their strategies, seeing attack simulations as a way to gain valuable information about their technology environments, defense postures, and the weaknesses hackers would find if they attack.<\/p>\n

Now a growing percentage of CISOs see offensive security as a must-have and, as such, are building up offensive capabilities and integrating them into their security processes to ensure the information revealed during offensive exercises leads to improvements in their overall security posture.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s super important to have time and resources dedicated to [using] threat intelligence and conducting tabletop exercises and getting to the point where you have purple teaming,\u201d Madden says, \u201cbecause you don\u2019t want to always be on your heels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Components of offensive security<\/h2>\n

Offensive security, or OffSec for short, is the practice of using attacker-style tactics to find and fix vulnerabilities in an organization\u2019s own IT environment.<\/p>\n

Dan Mellen<\/a>, global and US cyber CTO at professional services firm EY, defines it as the organization\u2019s \u201cidentification and exploitation of vulnerabilities before adversaries do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mellen sees several buckets of activities involved in offensive security, starting with vulnerability management at the bottom end of the maturity scale, and then moving up to attack service management and penetration testing<\/a>, to threat hunting<\/a> and adversarial simulations, such as tabletop exercises<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen there\u2019s the concept of purple teaming<\/a> where the organization looks at an attack scenario and what were the defenses that should have alerted but didn\u2019t and how to rectify those,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Other offensive security components include:<\/p>\n