by Lindsay Usherwood, general counsel at Usherwood Office Technology
Cybersecurity teams have no shortage of information. Vulnerability scans, alerts, patches, and reports can point to thousands of potential problems.
But which ones actually matter?
In this episode of Techless with Lindsay, I sat down with Anthony Pillitiere , co-founder of Horizon3.ai , to talk about taking an offensive approach to cybersecurity. By looking at your environment from an attacker’s perspective, your organization can better understand which weaknesses can actually be exploited, where an attacker could go next, and which risks deserve attention first.
Every vulnerability can look urgent on a report. In reality, your team has to make choices about where to spend its time.
An offense-driven approach adds context to those decisions by actively testing how an attacker could move through your environment. Which weaknesses can they exploit? What systems or data could they reach? And what would the impact be on the business?
Answering those questions can help turn a long list of cybersecurity findings into clear priorities.
In this cybersecurity episode from Usherwood, you’ll learn:
- What an offense-driven approach to cybersecurity looks like
- Why cybersecurity prioritization is such a difficult problem
- What autonomous penetration testing actually means
- Where traditional penetration tests can be limited
- How understanding attack paths provides important business context
- Why more frequent testing can give businesses a clearer picture of changing risk
- What the future “find, fix, verify” cybersecurity loop could look like
The biggest takeaway is simple: Understanding your cybersecurity risk requires seeing your environment from the attacker’s side.
Cybersecurity will never be about eliminating every possible risk. But continuously looking at your environment from an attacker’s perspective can help you focus your people, time, and resources on fixing the things that matter most.
Image at top courtesy of Vanguard Law magazine.
