The Gartner report has a more concise view of adversarial exposure validation use cases.<\/p>\n
\u201cSolutions in the AEV market consist of technology that helps:<\/em><\/p>\n Unlike other security validation products that focus on one or two of these uses cases, the Cymulate Exposure Validation Platform delivers the required technology, market expertise and history of customer success to fully deliver on every aspect of these use cases.<\/p>\n A few years ago, it would not be uncommon for blue teams to deploy breach and attack simulation to validate controls and for red teams to buy a separate solution for automated penetration testing. Today, Cymulate customers enjoy the benefits of a single, unified validation platform that serves both blue and red teams to automate testing for their specific needs and collaborate in a joint interface for purple teaming exercises, with live data simulations that validate prevention, SOC response time and response playbooks.<\/p>\n Figure 1. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.<\/p>\n We feel the Gartner Market Guide is a great resource for security teams considering automated security validation for the first time, replacing existing solutions or consolidating solutions to cover multiple use cases.<\/p>\n At the highest level, the market guide defines four mandatory features such as \u201cAbility to scale defensive testing with vendor-supplied attack scenarios that require little to no hacking knowledge to execute and obtain results data.\u201d<\/p>\n Gartner also scopes out 11 common features such as \u201cAbility to integrate with security controls via APIs or native interfaces to enhance the alignment of attack data with the defensive posture through contextualized content suggestions.\u201d<\/p>\n The report goes deeper on each of the use cases and maps more detailed mandatory and common features for each of the three use cases \u2013 optimize defense, improve exposure awareness and scale\u202foffensive-testing capabilities.<\/p>\n While we can\u2019t go into detail on each of these capabilities here, we believe that our unified exposure validation platform supports these mandatory and common features that Gartner\u00ae advocates in the report.<\/p>\n Cymulate provides the unified exposure validation for both blue and red teams. Blue teamers can focus on controls optimization with out-of-the box templates and daily threat updates to test the latest techniques without specialized hacking skills. Control integrations validate detection and provide actionable and automated remediation to strengthen controls for optimized defense.<\/p>\n For red teams, Cymulate provides its attack scenario workbench to either build attack chains and active campaigns from a library of more than 100,000 attack actions \u2013 or create and upload your own attack actions.<\/p>\n When blue and red teams come together for purple teaming exercises, Cymulate provides the deep integrations to map red team attacks to security control logs, alerts and response playbooks. At the end of the purple teaming exercises, Cymulate provides scorecards and heatmaps of strengths and weaknesses with actionable insights to improve cyber resilience.<\/p>\n At Cymulate, we believe you don\u2019t need another security assessment without a path to reduce risk \u2013 quickly, and preferably automated. This is where Cymulate really stands out from other solutions by going beyond the essential remediation guidance to push control updates and build custom detection rules for identified gaps.<\/p>\n When indicators of compromise can provide an immediate mitigation for a missed attack, Cymulate provides the option to automatically push these updates directly to endpoint, email and network security to block the threat.<\/p>\n To optimize detection for the missed attacks, Cymulate creates custom Sigma detection rules and then translates them into vendor-specific rules that can be directly applied to your EDR, SIEM and XDR.<\/p>\n Beyond essential control optimization, more mature cyber teams are moving to adversarial exposure validation as an essential piece of their evolution to continuous threat exposure management (CTEM), and indeed, many Cymulate customers are embracing this program. CTEM is a continuous process that includes scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation and mobilization in a coordinated program to proactively manage threat exposure.<\/p>\n In a CTEM program, validation provides a key differentiation from traditional vulnerability management. Because security teams cannot possibly patch and remediate the hundreds (if not thousands) of new exposure findings each week, validation provides the filter of what\u2019s truly exploitable, so security team can focus on the validated threat exposure.<\/p>\n CTEM also goes beyond typical CVEs to consider the un-patchable exposures that require risk mitigation of effective security controls. That proof of mitigation requires continuous validation.<\/p>\n \u201cAdversarial exposure validation, via technologies like breach and attack simulation (BAS) and automated penetration testing, extends the use of evidence to find vulnerabilities.\u202fGartner strongly advocates for the use of adversarial exposure validation, and it is a mandatory capability in CTEM.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Cymulate automates this process of exposure validation by emulating the threat to prove the effectiveness of security controls to prevent or detect an exploit of the threat. If controls are proven to mitigate the threat, patching and configuration updates don\u2019t have to be an emergency that disrupts operations; they can be included in the next schedule of updates. For the un-patchable exposures, Cymulate validation provides proof and evidence of mitigation.<\/p>\n Of course, there\u2019s a lot more to exposure validation and CTEM. Cymulate provides the platform for continuous, ongoing testing against target environments and assets. We update the platform with new attack scenarios and techniques every day, so teams can test against the latest threats, and can even automate their inclusion in attack scenarios. And this includes attack paths and root cause analysis of the exposure.<\/p>\n Gartner predicts that \u201cthrough 2027, 40% of organizations will have adopted formal exposure validation initiatives, most relying on adversarial exposure validation technologies and managed service providers for maturity and consistency.\u201d<\/p>\n Cymulate recognizes that security teams need options for how they implement exposure validation, so we\u2019re working with technology solution providers and MSSPs to roll out new offerings designed for the needs of their specific customers who require services and bundled solutions \u2013 like a self-healing EDR.<\/p>\n We\u2019re continuing to innovate by building automation and valuable applications of artificial intelligence that make exposure validation both easier to use and more advanced. We\u2019re researching and building prototypes for both autonomous adversarial emulation and adaptive control updates where context-aware AI agents target objectives. Once breach possibility is proven, an AI agent with context of the security controls automates (or suggests) the mitigation in real time.<\/p>\n\n
![\"cymulate](\"https:\/\/oberig-it.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/screenshot-2025-03-19-174458.png-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAdversarial Exposure Validation Required Features<\/h4>\n
Blue, Red and Purple Teams<\/h4>\n
Cymulate Goes Beyond Validation to Mobilize and Reduce Exposure<\/h4>\n
Evolution to Exposure Management<\/h4>\n
![\"cymulate](\"https:\/\/oberig-it.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/illustrationx2.jpg-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe Future of Exposure Validation<\/h4>\n