Offensive and defensive security are two common ways to strengthen your defense against severe threats like DDoS and ransomware. Offensive security uses techniques like penetration testing to simulate attacks and identify your system's vulnerable points. However, defensive security is reactive and incorporates tools such as firewalls and encryption for threat detection and mitigation.
Let's look at how they both work and which one is better. We'll also explore some key challenges and best practices to get the most out of these.
With offensive security, you can use methods like penetration testing to find weaknesses in your network before hackers exploit them. Here's how:
This way you can stimulate real-world attacks and test your organization's security.
The person who performs offensive security testing is known as an ethical or a white hat hacker. Before you confuse them with malicious hackers, here's what sets them apart: Ethical hackers work with organizations like FBA to identify and fix vulnerabilities to protect the state. On the other hand, malicious hackers exploit vulnerabilities to steal important data, such as bank details, for their gain.
(Related reading: black vs white vs grey hacking.)
Offensive security protects online assets from cyberattacks by finding loopholes in the system. There's no one way to implement this approach, but it involves these basic steps:
Although offensive security is a critical aspect of an effective cybersecurity strategy, it's challenging to implement across different jurisdictions while staying within budget.
Here are some common challenges you may face with it:
Offensive security operations, like penetration testing, may face these few limitations:
Since you need to hire specialized white hat hackers, offensive security can be expensive. Here are a couple of reasons about why these hackers are expensive to work with:
So, if you want to conduct thorough penetration tests, it’s time to increase your security budget.
Every organization wants to avoid unknown threats, but an offensive security approach fails to do that. Implementing this approach fully can take days. So, if there are any vulnerabilities in the system, zero-day attacks can exploit them within minutes. This makes it impossible to predict some unknown attacks quickly.
Defensive security incorporates different security measures to protect your network from attacks. Unlike offensive security, it focuses on setting up robust systems and networks rather than seeking vulnerabilities. This procedure is initiated after an incident occurs and here's how it works:
With no offensive security in place, it’s so important to create a defensive security plan to damage the control after an incident occurs. Here are some key steps to ensure a secure and resilient system:
Most businesses rely on defensive security to protect sensitive data and mitigate attacks. However, you may face these challenges while taking preventive actions:
Defensive security requires a team of experts to handle sophisticated threats like malware and phishing. That’s why the demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals is high. However, businesses are facing a shortage of skilled IT experts worldwide. More than four million professionals are needed to fill this gap.
Since these professionals have many career options, retaining them is challenging. Here’s what you can do to attract good talent:
Trust is a major concern with this approach for several reasons. First, you must give access to the security team, so spotting those with malicious intentions is hard. Secondly, using third-party tools can increase the risk of data leaks.
Like offensive security, budget is the biggest concern in defensive security. Small businesses do not have enough budgets for proper security measures. Also, companies that invest in defensive tools do not always get the expected value. This is because these tools may show false positives, which, if not spotted, can impact the security team's efficiency.
Protecting your network against vulnerabilities will always present challenges. However, you can always prevent these issues by adopting some best practices. Here are some recommendations to enforce these security methods more effectively:
Offensive and defensive security have their benefits and challenges. They involve different steps but have the same goal — to protect your online data. Offensive security is proactive in finding vulnerabilities before hackers do, while defensive security detects threats after they occur. You must incorporate both for a more robust security system.
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This posting does not necessarily represent Splunk's position, strategies or opinion.