Accelerating Security Maturity with Fortra Bundles

In The Importance of Layering Offensive Security Solutions, Fortra experts underscore the advantage of developing a single source offensive security tooling portfolio. Read on to find out the necessary ingredients for a proactive strategy and why Fortra’s ability to combine and maximize solutions optimizes security and produces the most effective outcomes.

The Five Elements of an Offensive Security Strategy

Throughout the course of the webinar, John Stahmann, Director, Solutions Engineering for Infrastructure Protection and Connor Johnson, Cybersecurity Account Executive for Infrastructure Protection review five basic elements of an offensive security strategy:

1. Determining Maturity | It’s critical to know where you’re starting from so that you don’t set an unrealistic pace. Growing steadily ensures you have staff or strategies in place to appropriately react to their findings.  
2. Becoming Proactive | Shifting to a proactive mindset involves going from reacting to attacks to anticipating them. By actively seeking out vulnerabilities and weaknesses, you can prioritize and remediated them before malicious actors can exploit them. 
3. Adding Offensive Security Tools | The right tools can make offensive practices like vulnerability management, pen testing, and red teaming achievable and effective.  
4. Expanding and Layering Solutions | There’s no silver bullet for offensive security but stacking security solutions enables organizations to expand their reach and ensure they have complete coverage across all areas of their environment.
5. Consolidating with Bundles | Layering solutions is necessary, but adding multiple tools can be pricy. Finding interoperable solutions from a single vendor can simplify efforts and reduce cost.  

Growing Your Cyber Maturity

The first step is to determine where your organization is in terms of cyber maturity. Your level maturity determines the offensive security step you lean into, but ultimately, you should leverage all available offensive angles and grow into each new layer. While no infrastructure is impenetrable, the trick is to close gaps and add obstacles to make your organization challenging enough that it’s not worth an attacker’s efforts. To do this, every layer counts.

Assess where on the cyber maturity scale your organization might be:

• Foundational Cybersecurity | This means technology that can give you tailored scans and give you an accurate assessment of vulnerabilities in your environment.
• Maturing Cybersecurity | At this point, can you figure out which vulnerabilities to prioritize first. You do that through a bit of pen testing, cross-checking across multiple environments.
• Advanced Testing | This is when you simulate real-world attacks with red team engagements. Red teaming imitates embedded attackers who use post-exploitation tactics to access critical data and assets. This is also the point at which you want to keep up with the cybercriminal Jones’ and match not only their tactics, but their technologies. The right solution bundle can do that.

Finding the Right Offensive Security Tools

And then find the tools that can best get you to the next level. As they describe it, offensive security tools are divided into three main categories.

• Vulnerability Management | Identify vulnerabilities and prioritize threats.
• Penetration Testing | Investigate the damage a potential attacker can inflict on your systems.
• Red Team Engagements | Imitate the role of a threat actor and challenge your own network.

These work great independently, and even better when used in tandem. Bundles can force-multiply your offensive security capacity by streamlining processes and removing the guesswork. As you are increasingly able to take on more multi-purpose functions, your cybersecurity maturity improves.\

Accelerating Growth with Bundles

Offensive security solutions in the Fortra portfolio can be combined to create several bundles for optimized effectiveness.

And that’s where the webinar takes off. Stahmann and Johnson share which solution sets work best for which use cases, and how each offensive security bundle tackles one of the above components completely.

By watching the full webinar, you’ll get the full details on the security potential of products like:

• Core Impact | Automated pen testing software
• Cobalt Strike | Red team operations
• Fortra VM | Vulnerability management and pen testing services
• Outflank Security Tooling (OST) | Evasive attack simulation toolkit

It’s nice to have simple answers. Consolidating vendors, solutions and categories helps overwhelmed and under-resourced teams improve their security maturity and make themselves unavailable to opportunistic cybercriminals.