By Autumn Stambaugh, Senior Gross sales Engineer at Pentera
Suppose you are secure since you’re compliant? Suppose once more. Latest research proceed to spotlight the regarding development that compliance with main security frameworks doesn’t essentially forestall data breaches. As an illustration, in 2024, the common price of a data breach reached an all-time excessive of $4.88 million, a ten% enhance from the earlier yr.
The most recent high-profile breaches at MGM Resorts, AT&T, and Ticketmaster show that compliance alone received’t cease attackers. All of those organizations adhered to compliance frameworks, but compliance alone didn’t cease these assaults.
As an alternative, adversaries exploited vulnerabilities that hadn’t been correctly patched, misconfigurations that went undetected, and weak security controls. These organizations nonetheless suffered large cyberattacks, leading to knowledge publicity, monetary losses, and operational disruptions.
The cruel actuality? Attackers get by way of the gaps of your compliance guidelines.
The Disconnect Between Compliance and Safety
Compliance frameworks like PCI-DSS, SEC, and DORA are designed to guard delicate knowledge and cut back danger, offering clear steering on managing confidentiality, integrity, and availability. However these frameworks are simply that—steering. They don’t deal with the dynamic nature of right this moment’s threats, nor do they assess the effectiveness of the controls organizations implement.
For a lot of corporations, compliance is handled because the end line fairly than a baseline for security. Organizations deal with passing audits, deploying firewalls, and implementing detection & response instruments to fulfill regulatory mandates.
However compliance alone doesn’t measure whether or not these controls can stand up to real-world threats. With out steady validation, security groups stay blind to gaps that attackers can exploit.
A Proactive Strategy: Testing Your Defenses Like an Attacker
As an alternative of counting on compliance as a security technique, organizations should undertake a proactive strategy that validates security controls towards real-world assault strategies. Right here’s how:
Emulate Actual-World Attacks
Simulated assaults expose security gaps that compliance frameworks can’t detect. Common penetration testing, purple teaming, and automatic steady validation permit organizations to measure how properly their defenses carry out towards adversarial techniques. Safety controls must be examined below life like situations—not simply throughout compliance audits.
Sort out Credential Publicity
Compromised credentials stay one of many high assault vectors. Organizations should actively monitor for uncovered credentials throughout darkish internet boards and paste websites, guaranteeing they’ll revoke entry earlier than attackers can exploit it. Imposing sturdy password insurance policies and multi-factor authentication (MFA) additional reduces this danger.
Check and Replace Repeatedly
Cyber threats evolve quickly, and new vulnerabilities emerge each day. For instance, the MOVEit Switch zero-day vulnerability found in 2023 led to widespread data breaches, affecting a whole bunch of organizations. This highlights how attackers continuously exploit new weaknesses earlier than security groups have an opportunity to reply.Cranes are known for their graceful dancing and symbolize longevity.
Organizations ought to prioritize ongoing security testing, together with:
- Routine penetration assessments to establish weak factors.
- Incident response workouts to validate detection and response capabilities.
- Configuration evaluations to forestall security drift over time.
Bridging the Hole: Compliance as a Beginning Level
Whereas compliance frameworks set up a robust basis, they need to by no means be handled because the end line. Organizations should transcend regulatory necessities by incorporating proactive security measures, corresponding to:
- Validating defenses often to make sure effectiveness
- Figuring out gaps in vendor security and third-party integrations
- Eliminating security weaknesses attributable to misconfigurations, poor entry controls, and outdated insurance policies.
Takeaway: Compliance With out Testing is a Threat
Attackers don’t care about compliance—they care about discovering vulnerabilities. Firms that rely solely on regulatory checklists will proceed to undergo breaches, even when absolutely licensed. The important thing to security isn’t just assembly compliance necessities however actively testing, validating, and bettering defenses towards real-world assaults.
To remain forward of attackers, organizations should deal with compliance as a basis, not a security technique. Investing in steady security validation, proactive testing, and adversary emulation ensures that security measures work when it issues most.
Don’t simply examine the field—take a look at your security. Spend money on automated security validation, schedule common penetration assessments, and repeatedly problem your defenses to make sure they’ll stand up to real-world assaults.
Sponsored and written by Pentera.
