The cyber world is riddled with assessments. Everywhere you look, an assessment is occurring. Do you need an assessment? Which assessment is right for your organization? Which assessments are required for your industry?
Malicious actors are continuously attempting to access organizational systems and proprietary data to profit financially. Organizations need to be proactive to stay ahead of malicious actors in the digital landscape and prevent disruptions in normal operations. By conducting regular cyber assessments, your organization can illuminate vulnerabilities in systems and networks, identify gaps in cyber defenses, validate security and configuration baselines, ensure compliance requirements are met, and validate the effectiveness of policies and user awareness training.
A true cyber assessment is not a check box – it is a tool used to test and validate the security posture of an application, device, network, or organization. All cyber assessments follow the standard methodology of Information Gathering, Situation Analysis, Actions on Objective, Analysis, and Reporting (Figure 1).
Cyber assessments come in many variations, and they all have their place within your organization. Let’s look at some common types of cyber assessments and their purpose.
Policy Review
Technology is constantly changing in nearly every industry – policies and guidance must keep pace to protect your company from today’s threat. A Policy Review is conducted to assess current cybersecurity policies within an organization and determine what modifications are required to remain effective. This is typically a collaborative effort between your organization and cybersecurity experts. Experienced professionals will carefully review current policies and recommend changes in line with industry best practices while balancing confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Configuration Audit
System and network configurations are a key component to your organization’s cybersecurity baseline. Any modification to a configuration has the potential to massively impact an organization’s security posture and possibly open an avenue for attack. Configuration audits illuminate modifications to baseline configurations and assist in validating the change management process. This type of assessment is normally done by reviewing the current running configuration of all active network devices and endpoints and comparing configuration settings to documented baseline settings and/or recommended best practice settings.
Compliance Assessment
A compliance assessment validates that your organization’s IT assets and/or cybersecurity program are in compliance with rules, regulations, and standards governing your industry. Certain industries, such as healthcare or payment card processing, have published security standards for computing environments that must be met. In this case, conducting an annual compliance assessment is likely required. You can also utilize a compliance assessment to verify proper implementation of security measures from your organization’s own cybersecurity policies. Your team can complete these assessments by validating required security controls and local policies against current documentation, configurations, and processes.
Vulnerability Assessment
The purpose of a vulnerability assessment is to identify known weaknesses and security flaws. Known vulnerabilities are common attack avenues for malicious actors. Identifying and blocking known, and common, attack paths is the first step in increasing your organization’s security posture. Most vulnerability assessments are conducted utilizing automated tools, however manual assessments may be required in certain circumstances. Proper analysis is required to determine false positive findings, false negative findings, and risk for identified vulnerabilities.
OSINT/Exposure Assessment
Your organization may inadvertently provide valuable information to malicious actors through job postings, social media, or your own website. Identifying and eliminating excessive public information reduces your organization’s attack footprint and forces malicious actors to spend additional time identifying their target. An OSINT/exposure assessment is used to identify what publicly available information can be learned about an organization, its employees, and its computing environment. Through a combination of advanced search techniques and active scanning of public facing IP addresses, your team can identify the exposure area of your organization.
Phishing Assessment
A phishing assessment allows an organization to determine the potential susceptibility of its employees to phishing attacks. With phishing attacks being a highly successful avenue of compromise, ensuring your users can identify real world phishing attempts is a priority. A phishing assessment is a realistic phishing campaign where a test team sends phishing attempts with benign payloads to a target organization. Statistical data is collected from all clicks on links and downloads of attachments to determine the number of user interactions with the phishing messages.
Penetration Tests
A penetration test, or pentest for short, is a simulated cyber-attack against a target network, device, or application, utilizing the same tools, techniques, and procedures that a malicious actor would use. Pentests help to illuminate vulnerabilities and attack paths that are not detectable by signature-based vulnerability scanners. Pentesters are also able to validate the results of vulnerability scanners and determine if the identified vulnerabilities are exploitable in your environment. The overall goal of any pentest is to identify vulnerabilities before they can be exploited and to assist in reducing the attack surface of an organization. At CyberNEX, our testers follow the offensive methodology outlined in Figure 1, continuously iterating to accomplish the desired end state.
External Penetration Test
Pentests can be conducted as an external or internal test. An external pentest is done from the perspective of an attacker on the open internet attempting to breach the boundary defenses of an organization. This is done by scanning for open ports to identify services and applications that are listening for inbound connections. The primary goal of an external pentest is to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the organization’s external infrastructure that could be exploited by malicious actors.
Internal Penetration Test
Internal pentests are done from an assumed breach perspective. Many organizations focus on boundary defenses and neglect internal defenses. For a typical internal pentest, the test team will connect to an internal portion of the network with the permission level of a basic user and attempt to elevate privileges to gain access to sensitive data and systems. The purpose is to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses that could be exploited by insider threats or malicious actors who have already gained a foothold within the internal network.
Application Security Assessments
Application testing is a crucial process to ensure the quality and reliability of web, API, and mobile applications. Application assessments involve evaluating the application’s functionality, performance, security, and usability to identify and rectify any defects or issues that may impact the user experience. Security assessments of these applications are done utilizing automated and manual tools to discover vulnerabilities and attack vectors. The same methodology seen in Figure 1 is applied when testing web and mobile applications.
Teaming Assessments
Teaming assessments share similarities with penetration tests but they remain very different. The Three common types of teaming assessments are red, blue, and purple. Typically, a teaming assessment is a long-term engagement that focuses on multiple aspects of cyber security.
Red Team Assessments
A red team assessment combines aspects of internal, external, and application pentests and continuously evaluates the security posture of the network for the duration of the assessment. The red team assumes the role of an attacker and attempts to simulate real-world cyber threats and attack scenarios to identify weaknesses and potential vulnerabilities that might go unnoticed in traditional security assessments. The goal of a red team assessment is not just to identify individual security flaws but to assess the overall effectiveness of an organization’s security posture in detecting, preventing, and responding to sophisticated and persistent cyber threats. It helps organizations understand their risk exposure and improve their overall cybersecurity readiness.
Blue Team Assessments
A blue team assessment is a cybersecurity exercise conducted to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of their existing security controls, detection capabilities, and incident response procedures. Unlike red team assessments, which simulate attacks and emulate adversaries, blue team assessments focus on assessing the organization’s defensive capabilities and its ability to detect and respond to security incidents. The primary goal of a blue team assessment is to enhance the organization’s overall cybersecurity resilience and improve its ability to detect and mitigate threats in real-time.
Purple Team Assessment
A purple team assessment is a collaborative cybersecurity exercise that combines elements of both red teaming and blue teaming. In a purple team assessment, the red team (offensive security experts) works together with the blue team (defensive security experts) to simulate realistic attack scenarios, improve detection capabilities, and enhance overall cybersecurity resilience. The purple team approach helps organizations to improve their overall security posture by leveraging the expertise of both offensive and defensive teams. It fosters a proactive and learning-focused cybersecurity culture, which is essential for staying ahead of evolving cyber threats.
Assessment Timing
| Type | Recommended Timeframe |
| Policy Review | Biannually |
| Configuration Audit | Quarterly and anytime significant changes are made |
| Compliance Assessment | Annually or as required by standards |
| Vulnerability Assessment | Weekly for key terrain
Monthly for all devices |
| OSINT/Exposure Assessment | Quarterly |
| Phishing Assessments | Quarterly |
| External Pentest | Annually |
| Internal Pentest | Annually |
| Teaming Assessments | Continuously |
Malicious actors are always working. Conducting the right cyber assessments will aide in increasing your security posture and reducing your attack surface, keeping you one step ahead. No matter what state your network is in, and regardless of your current cybersecurity posture, CyberNEX is here to help. We have professionals ready and eager to build a custom assessment package to suit your needs. Our experienced cadre of technical experts provide solutions to the toughest challenges in cyberspace. Reach out to us at [email protected] for more information or schedule an appointment.
