Solution Brief
SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform
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Defined by Gartner as the next evolution of breach and attack simulation (BAS), adversarial exposure validation (AEV) is a security solution that continuously assesses how well security controls prevent, detect, and respond to real-world adversarial behaviors—across multiple environments and the entire attack lifecycle.
Whether you’re validating controls across 50,000 endpoints or seeking to align with frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK® or the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), an AEV platform is a critical component within your tech stack. But not all AEV platforms are created equal. In order to be impactful, it must simulate real-world threats, scale with your footprint, integrate into your ecosystem, and drive action.
How can you confidently choose an AEV platform that will deliver on these promises? Below, we’ve outlined 13 key questions—based on tips and lessons learned from mature, enterprise security teams—that you should ask as you consider your next AEV investment.
1. Do they simulate the full attacker lifecycle—or just the front door?
True exposure validation doesn’t stop at the perimeter.
Look for a platform that also maps attacker movement after the initial foothold—through privilege escalation, lateral movement, and exfiltration—at enterprise scale and across hybrid environments. Some platforms claim kill-chain coverage but lack post-breach depth or only run superficial red team automations.
2. Can they validate both security gaps and control performance?
Most AEV vendors run attack simulations. Few validate whether your defenses detect or block them.
AEV should tell you not just what an attacker could do, but also whether your SIEM, EDR, or firewall did anything about it. This holds especially true across sprawling endpoint, SIEM, and cloud environments.
SafeBreach Insight:
SafeBreach uniquely correlates attack success/failure with security control behavior, enabling you to validate prevention, detection, and alert fidelity—across all vectors.
3. How extensive—and customizable—is the attack content library?
A platform with only a few thousand techniques can’t keep pace with today’s threats. Some vendors claim that “less is more,” but that’s often an excuse for limited depth not suited to complex or multi-tenant environments.
Look for platforms with broad coverage mapped to real-world threats, frequent updates, and the ability to create and modify custom attack chains. A deep, diverse, and extensible library ensures you’re testing what actually matters to your organization.
SafeBreach Insight:
Our Hacker’s Playbook is the largest in the industry—with 30,000+ attack methods—and is mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, threat actors, malware families, and ransomware groups. You can run curated scenarios or build fully customized attack chains tailored to your environment.
Insider Tip: Other platforms lack support for user-generated attack logic, limiting testing to prebuilt templates and “safe payloads only.”
4. How fast do they add new attack content?
With the threat landscape evolving daily, your platform must keep up. Some vendors take weeks—or months—to update their libraries after major threats emerge. That delay can leave your defenses exposed when time matters most.
Look for a platform that is committed to generating new, timely content in response to emerging threats that can help your organization quickly understand whether it is protected in the critical early days after a new attack.
SafeBreach Insight:
SafeBreach maintains a 24-hour SLA for adding new attacks based on US-CERT and FBI Flash alerts. Our dedicated threat research team enables rapid response to new ransomware, zero-days, and nation-state activity.
Insider Tip: Vendors who merely repackage existing intelligence or update quarterly can’t help you stay ahead.
5. Do their findings drive prioritized action—or alert fatigue?
In large organizations, alert fatigue is a real risk. Look for a platform that augments findings with business context and mitigation guidance that aligns to your enterprise workflows and tooling.
SafeBreach Insight:
We provide risk-prioritized mitigation paths, integrated with frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK and mapped to high-value assets. Our reporting helps SOCs act fast—and gives CISOs meaningful business context.
Insider Tip: Other platforms can prove challenging for users due to noisy dashboards, unclear alerts, and lack of actionable guidance.
6. Can they deliver C-level insights and board-ready reports?
Your executive team doesn’t want packet captures or raw technique logs. They need risk context, trends over time, and actionable summaries. Look for platforms that provide C-level dashboards, alignment with compliance frameworks, and visualizations that help communicate technical risk in business terms.
SafeBreach Insight:
Our platform generates executive-ready summaries and dashboards designed for board-level communication—essential for Fortune 500 enterprises navigating frameworks like DORA, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Insider Tip: Take a careful look at reporting capabilities. Don’t settle for an AEV vendor offering only tactical outputs without leadership-ready summaries.
7. How well does it integrate into your ecosystem?
True AEV platforms must integrate seamlessly into your SIEM, SOAR, EDR, cloud platforms, ticketing systems, and more—in order to automate remediation workflows, enrich context, and reduce mean time to respond (MTTR) at enterprise scale.
SafeBreach Insight:
We offer 25+ integrations, including CrowdStrike, Splunk, Microsoft, SentinelOne, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto, with support for role-based access, custom integrations, and air-gapped deployments.
Insider Tip: Other platforms have been flagged for friction with major tools like CrowdStrike or requiring excessive support cycles to enable basic integration.
8. Is the platform ready to scale across hybrid environments?
Your environment isn’t just endpoints; it’s cloud workloads, identity systems, and OT infrastructure.
SafeBreach Insight:
We support cloud, on-prem, hybrid, and OT environments, with lightweight agents and production-safe operations that support massive scale—without disrupting your environment.
Insider Tip: Some vendors offer flashy dashboards but struggle at scale—especially in complex or regulated environments.
9. What’s the real pricing model and how does it scale?
Some platforms charge per vector. Others by IP. Some charge you again for features you assumed were included.
SafeBreach Insight:
Our pricing is tiered by IP count, with bundled capabilities at higher tiers. For enterprises, this delivers strong ROI and deeper value at scale—including dedicated support and optional managed services like SafeBreach-as-a-Service.
Insider Tip: Per-vector pricing models may look cheaper upfront, but can balloon as you expand or need full kill-chain validation.
10. Can they simulate attacks and validate detection rules?
AEV is more than prevention; it’s about validating that your detection engineering is on point.
SafeBreach Insight:
Our detection validation capabilities ensure your SIEM and EDR alerts trigger as expected, reducing false negatives and alert fatigue—critical in high-volume SOC environments.
Insider Tip: Many platforms don’t test detection rules at all, leaving gaps invisible until it’s too late.
11. Who’s using the platform—and at what scale?
Customer logos tell you a lot. So does the size of environments a platform can actually support.
SafeBreach Insight:
Trusted by enterprises like Regeneron, Deloitte, Experian, Pepsi, and Carlsberg, SafeBreach powers simulations across tens of thousands of endpoints—safely, continuously, and at scale.
Insider Tip: If a vendor’s biggest case study is a regional credit union, ask whether they’re ready for global complexity.
12. Will you get a hands-on customer success team, or a ticket number and a wait?
Whether you’re onboarding or simulating across regions, white-glove support matters at scale.
SafeBreach Insight:
Our award-winning customer success team is made up of experts who are practitioners first, offering hands-on support from onboarding to reporting to roadmap alignment. We’ve helped the world’s largest companies scale and mature their exposure validation programs.
Insider Tip: Other vendors are frequently flagged for slow, reactive support—especially in enterprise deployments.
13. Do they produce original threat research, or just repackage what’s already out there?
Plenty of vendors claim to have “labs.” But few deliver operational research with real-time impact that can be immediately leveraged by your security team.
With the threat landscape evolving daily, you need more than recycled threat intel—they need original research that fuels timely and actionable simulations.
SafeBreach Insight:
SafeBreach Labs is one of the few research teams in the industry dedicated to producing “Original Attacks”—novel methods discovered by our researchers before they’re seen in the wild. Our team delivers content you can simulate immediately—often before IOCs are publicly available—to help you future-proof your defenses against next-gen threats.
Examples:
- Simulations for Clop, Ragnar Locker, and BlackCat available before IOCs went public
- Research presentations at every Black Hat and DEF CON for the last six years
- Partnerships with EDR/SIEM vendors to validate detection rules within hours of CVE disclosure
Insider Tip: Other vendors may repackage public research. SafeBreach delivers original content that helps you act—not just react.
Bottom Line: Don’t Just Buy the Hype. Demand Proof, Not Promises.
There’s a growing gap between what some platforms promise and what they deliver at enterprise scale. Before selecting any AEV vendor, ask the questions that matter:
- Will it simulate real attacker behavior?
- Will it validate control effectiveness and detection?
- Will it integrate with my stack, scale with my footprint, and support my teams?
- Will it help me brief the board—and actually reduce risk?
If the answer isn’t a confident “yes,” that platform is not built for where your security program is headed.
Want to see SafeBreach in action?
Book a demo with our team to see how we deliver realistic simulations, prioritized remediation, and enterprise-grade AEV—across your hybrid infrastructure.
