One of the (many) reasons I enjoy writing is because it provides me with the opportunity to help others understand the amount of effort that goes into producing the software solutions that we depend on. Today we'll be looking at another digital infrastructural practice. In our current society, our values have strayed so much that people who are able to hack and possibly disrupt digital infrastructure are made infamous, for context, imagine someone burgling your home and getting an "attaboy!" when caught, how would you feel?
THE EFFECT OF SOCIETY ON THE RISE OF CYBERATTACKS
The trend of giving hackers some form of street cred is possibly a contributory factor to why we had more cyberattacks in the first six months of 2021 than we had in the entirety of 2020. This also means that organizations have to invest more in cybersecurity to ensure smooth operations and keep our data safe. Cybersecurity as an industry is estimated to be worth over $200 Billion and today we'll be looking at one of the ways this staggering sum of money is spent. Today we'll be looking at automated breach and attack simulations.
A RELATABLE EXPLANATION
If you've ever had a dress rehearsal, a mock test or a mock interview, then you probably get the concept of breach and attack simulation, it's basically administering immunization to software solutions. Breach and attack simulations help identify weaknesses in software solutions by doing what hackers do, attack the software solution. If you noticed, I kept mentioning "breach and attack simulation" as against "automated breach and attack simulation". This is intentional because breach and attack simulation can be done manually or using software to automate the process (and steal our jobs 😂).
THE MAJOR PLOTHOLE OF MANUAL BREACH AND ATTACK SIMULATION
A lot of organizations that use manual breach and attack simulation fall prey to poor testing and this is because they tend to have these tests periodically and during off-peak hours when their digital infrastructure is more likely to be under a lot of stress, we can understand military drills being periodical because of the nature of military drills and cost implications, with cybersecurity, anyone with a laptop can be a potential threat. Why this is bad is because stress testing is supposed to be part of breach and attack simulations and trust me, hackers aren't going to say "let's wait till their platform is less stressed and capable of withstanding our attack before we attack them" 🤣.
FINALLY
Automated breach and attack testing run round the clock, is a lot faster and more detailed while giving real-time updates and suggestions that can help improve the digital infrastructure in question. This is why it's better than its manual counterpart. Note that automated breach and attack simulations aren't the same as automation testing (weird and confusing, I know 😓)