Welcome back listeners to the Cyber Resilience Brief, a SafeBreach podcast, and a particularly warm welcome to our growing number of new listeners. We love to see you. We’d love to hear from you. Go give us a shout-out on LinkedIn if you want ideas for future episodes to reach our ears. Anyway, I’m your host, Tova Devoren, and today with me, as usual, is my favorite offensive cybersecurity engineer, Adrian Culley. We’re covering the final episode of our special November series on critical infrastructure security and resilience. Adrian, we’ve covered the technical tools, BAS, AEV, and CART, that enable continuous validation. Today, let’s frame them within CISA’s core resilience principles: know, assess, plan, and continuously improve. It’s a perfect paradigm, Tova. The CISA framework is strategic guidance, and our validation tools are the operational engine that powers the final, most critical step, continuous improvement. Great. So let’s start at the beginning with the first two steps. Know your infrastructure, and then assess your risk. So, know your infrastructure requires detailed dependency mapping, which we address with AV’s supply chain focus. It helps you adopt a true risk-based approach to your cybersecurity, to prioritize the five percent of systems that carry 95%t of the risk. Remember we’ve mentioned before, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. Assessing your risk is precisely what AEV does. It models the threats against your specific environment, giving you a quantified adversary centric risk score. Right. Then comes make a plan and exercise it. This involves developing incident response playbooks and then running tabletop exercises. A tabletop exercise is a great way to test the team response and plan’s logic. It’s a cognitive drill, but a successful exercise doesn’t guarantee security efficacy. The plan might assume the firewall works, but does it really? This is where continuous validation takes over. So our validation tools bridge the gap between a written plan and operational reality. How does BAS and CART integrate with the exercise at phase? BAS and CART validate the technical assumptions of your plans. If your incident response plan says our EDR will detect lateral movement within two minutes, CAART runs that exact lateral movement scenario continuously. If the detection time is five minutes instead of two, your plan is flawed. We move from did the team follow the plan, a tabletop outcome, to did the security controls perform as the plan required, which is a validation outcome. This provides verifiable metrics, not just a post-exercise review, for the executive team. This data-driven approach allows an organization to truly measure progress to continuously improve, which is CISA’s final step. That’s the critical link. Resilience isn’t a state. It’s a measured capability to withstand and recover. BAS, AV, and CART provide the only way to continuously measure the effectiveness of that capability. They turn quantitative exercises into quantitative verifiable data. And that’s important. That’s important for leadership and boards no matter what industry you’re in, and honestly, regardless of even resilience, even if you’re going back to traditional measurements of cyber risk. But I do I digress. For CI leadership and boards, the resolve to be resilient theme translates in the end to investment. It all goes back to the money. So how does continuous validation justify that investment better than traditional testing? It ties security directly to operational continuity and regulatory risk. Traditional security is seen as a cost center. Continuous validation is an operational metric. When I show a board a heat map, I’m not showing them a list of vulnerabilities. I’m showing them the percentage of the network that would be compromised by a known threat actor, which directly translates to potential downtime and regulatory fines. That’s a language the C suite understands, Tova. Makes sense. So continuous validation is the tool that quantifies the return on security investment, not ROI, ROSI. Precisely. It allows you to prove we invested X in network segmentation, and CART shows that our prevention efficacy for lateral movement across the IT/OT boundary is now ninety eight percent. This measurable improvement in efficacy is the ultimate proof of resilience. Well said, Adrian. You know, as we wrap up this special series, as we see these different threads come together, what would you say is the key takeaway for CI owners and operators this November? My call to action, the SafeBreach call to action, is simple. Operationalize your offensive knowledge. Awareness is great, but true resilience requires a continuous offensive mindset. Don’t wait for CISA to publish a new threat bulletin. Use AEV to test for it the moment it’s released. Don’t wait for a vulnerability. Use CART to continuously validate your compensating controls against arbitrary behaviors. That’s right. It’s about building a living, breathing security posture that constantly adapts and moves where you need it to move. It is. The adversary is always testing. The adversary does not rest, as we previously covered. The only way to be truly resilient is to be testing and validating safely and continuously right alongside them. Let’s reverse the Abstry Advantage and move from being alongside them to being ahead of them. This November, let your Resolve to be Resilient be backed by the continuous, undeniable proof provided by breach and attack simulation, adversary exposure validation, and continuous red teaming. A powerful message to close out our series, Adrianne. Thank you so much for guiding us through the strategic importance of validation for critical infrastructure. And thank you to our listeners for joining us this November for the Cyber Resilience Brief. And until next time, stay safe. Stay safe with SafeBreach. The Cyber Resilience Brief is a SafeBreach podcast, executive produced by Tova Devoren and Adrian Cully. Sound provided by Adobe Music. Editing done with Adobe podcasts. Distribution and tracking provided by Podbean. If you enjoy the podcast and like to learn more, please check us out at w w w dot safe breach dot com. S a f e b r e a c h dot com. And don’t forget to leave us a five star review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
