What is Offensive Cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity has become a fact of life for every organization worldwide. Organizations need to ensure their networks, websites, hardware, applications, and data are secured against cyberattacks — and to do that, they need to find and fix security weaknesses that a cybercriminal could otherwise exploit. This becomes even a more pressing need, as the number of endpoints and attack surfaces of companies grow rapidly, and new & smarter attack methods are introduced by cybercriminals.
Companies can do this in two ways. First, they use a defensive security team (known as a blue team) to detect and protect against threats using a wide array of tools such as firewall, EDR and forensics tools (e.g. see our investment Binalyze), IPS, SIEM, or Breach and Attack Simulation platforms (e.g. see our portfolio company Picus Security). Second, they might use an internal or external offensive security team (known as a red team) to proactively search for vulnerabilities in the organization’s security posture. An effective cybersecurity program employs both defensive and offensive security, as neither is sufficient in isolation.
The #1 Challenge in Offensive Security
Offensive cybersecurity in itself is not a new practice. However, the tool stack used by the pentesters is still in its early days. For the most part, internal red teams and external pentesters rely on a broad array of commercial and open-source hacking and security research tools, which are still in the early days of their automation lifecycle.
In particular, most offensive security techniques require a lot of manual and repetitive work. Pentesters use a huge number of different tools, manually configuring, deploying, and testing each in turn. Pentesters even have to manually build their pipeline (a chained series of events or actions), iterate over it, and rebuild them from scratch for each new project. Naturally, all of this can take a huge amount of time, and the complexity involved makes it hard for beginner and intermediate pentesters to apply their skills effectively.
Trickest: Automated Cybersecurity Platform
Trickest aggregates 100+ open-source offensive cybersecurity tools and ensures all of them are kept up to date and with full documentation. Because the platform is ‘white box’ — meaning users can see exactly what goes on inside — it gives pentesters complete visibility and configurability over their testing process. Trickest also handles the infrastructure management under the hood. Users can easily deploy their testing workflows on the Cloud with one click, configure and run automated processes, without worrying about scaling of resources and Cloud costs.