Spirent Communications announced the European preview of CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment, the first data breach validation solution based on emulation technology. The preview will take place at Black Hat Europe in London (December 5 and 6).

Unlike simulation-based data breach validation tools that merely replay traffic, Spirent's CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment solution accurately assesses an organization's security posture by emulating hacker, malware and attack behavior using stateful and realistic traffic scenarios - including the actual malicious payloads seen in the real world. This provides a holistic and hyper-realistic security evaluation of an organization's networks and devices.

"Organizations are looking to take proactive steps to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses. The likelihood and stakes of a data breach, both in terms of financial penalties and the impact on the company's reputation, are simply too high," said David DeSanto, director of products and threat research for Spirent. "CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment uses real-world attacks and techniques that fully emulate realistic cybersecurity scenarios, enabling organizations to fully assess their network defenses, as well as identify and remediate weaknesses before they are compromised."

Beyond Simulation with Data Breach Emulation

A study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that cybercrime costs the global economy $600 billion per year. With these ever-growing costs, organizations need to be proactive, identifying weak spots in their network defenses and fixing them or mitigating any risk before an attacker can exploit them.

Network security assessments that emulate real-world attacks as realistically as possible are critical for determining where security needs to be addressed and improved. Simulated attacks rely on replayed network traffic and fake network activities. But many security solutions detect and ignore simulated attacks with artificial network payloads, treating them as false, non-malicious traffic and either allowing the traffic to pass through or simply blocking it as invalid. Simulated attacks and network traffic do not adequately validate an organization's ability to defend against cyber-attacks.

Spirent has amassed a formidable repository of real-world attack components, including exploits, applications, and malware scenarios. This repository-powered by Spirent TestCloud-combined with analysis from Spirent's threat research team, Spirent SecurityLabs, and its partnerships with the threat intelligence community, enable Spirent to stay current on emerging attack tools, techniques, and processes.

Attackers exploit the weakest link in a network to gain access and then move laterally to locate and compromise valuable resources such as intellectual property and other sensitive company data. An effective security assessment tool must function the same way.

CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment can begin an attack or intrusion scenario in any part of the network and pivot across multiple internal network segments to provide a realistic attack scenario. It can be deployed with virtual or cloud agents anywhere in an organization, including internal networks, data centers, and private or public cloud infrastructures.

Hacking Demo and Presentation on Automated Purple Team Testing

In addition to previews of the CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment solution at Black Hat Europe, Spirent researcher and managing consultant Aleksander Gorkowienko will demonstrate a simulated man-in-the-middle attack on a city's infrastructure, hacking a control system for a city's streetlights. The attack demonstration will take place at Spirent's booth during exhibition hours, December 5 and 6.

David DeSanto will present a session titled "Automated Purple Team Testing - Leveraging Red vs Blue to Reduce Risk!" on Wednesday, December 5. DeSanto will describe the need for a holistic, automated solution operating within a live network to enable active monitoring and automate ongoing evaluations, such as an automated Purple Team assessment. The session will cover the purpose and value of automated Purple Team assessments and describe how they can help organizations ensure that their network defenses are always ready.