Data Breach Notification
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Data Security
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Incident & Breach Response
25 years in the cybersecurity industry has made me a first-hand witness to the evolution of vulnerability management (VM) from traditional scanning solutions to consolidated cloud platforms. VM has been the foundation of enterprise cybersecurity strategies for years, following the cycle of periodic scanning, prioritization, and remediation that created a fleeting sense of security.
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Today’s security teams, especially global enterprises with complex, dynamic environments, need much more than vulnerability scans or annual penetration tests to stay ahead as they face evolving threats. They need an efficient, scalable way to continuously validate their exposure to real-world attacks across all layers of their infrastructure, especially as the implementation of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) programs skyrockets across industries.
While mature offensive security programs already include penetration testing and red teaming, there is still a gap for a continuous, scalable way to validate exposure to achieve CTEM. That’s where Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) comes in.
What is Adversarial Exposure Validation?
Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) is defined by Gartner as “technologies that deliver consistent, continuous and automated evidence of the feasibility of an attack.”(1) These individualized technologies, including automated pentesting, red teaming, and breach and attack simulation (BAS), have evolved into adversarial exposure validation.
At the baseline, AEV technologies are capable of autonomously performing attack scenarios across multiple attack vectors (e.g. email, application infrastructure, malware, etc.) These technologies deliver reporting that aligns with standard security frameworks, such as MITRE ATT&CK, provides attack scoring, and prioritized lists of exposures and likely attack paths that help security teams measure the potential impact of each exposure. Most importantly, they provide suggested remediation actions to help users achieve the ultimate goal of proactively fortifying their defenses and strengthening their security posture.
In short, unlike static assessments, AEV gives security teams the freedom to test, validate, and respond to exposures as frequently as needed, without being forced to depend on services or infrastructure. The real value of AEV lies in the fact that it not only identifies exposures, but proves what is actually exploitable, demonstrating how real-world attackers would bypass their security controls to successfully exploit those exposures and move laterally in their systems.
What’s Missing from Most Cybersecurity Strategies?
Traditional vulnerability management (VM) programs, while effective to a certain point, rely on manual pentesting, red teaming, and vulnerability scanners that present organizations with a unique set of challenges in today’s threat landscape:
- Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), while it has made pentesting more efficient and simpler to manage with SaaS-based delivery, and some use of AI and automation, is still project-based, offering only periodic, project-based assessments.
- Vulnerability scanners identify massive lists of vulnerabilities, often including a considerable number of false positives, but lack the context and validation it takes to understand which exposures are truly exploitable, let alone how.
- These fragmented approaches often do not operate from the perspective of a real-world attacker, failing to execute lateral movement to identify exploitable attack paths.
- Most importantly, these methods do not provide continuous, real-time insight into actual risk, making it difficult for security leaders to confidently prioritize remediation efforts.
While pentesting, red teaming, and vulnerability scanning are still all essential components of a proactive security strategy, security teams need more than fragmented, point-in-time insights. They need continuous, validated, and actionable visibility into real-world risk.
How AEV Helps Security Leaders Make Better Decisions
Gartner predicts that “through 2027, 40% of organizations will have adopted formal exposure validation initiatives, most relying on AEV technologies and managed service providers for maturity and consistency”—and for good reason.(1)
Because security leaders today are under immense pressure to decide, quickly and confidently, where to focus their limited time, budget, and resources, traditional security testing solutions alone, like scanners, pentesting, and red teaming often fall short. Their fragmented and point-in-time nature doesn’t reflect real-world, always-on attacker behavior, limiting the insights they can use to make risk-informed decisions with total confidence.
Adversarial Exposure Validation fills this critical gap and empowers security leaders to make smarter, more impactful decisions in a few key ways:
1. It Helps Determine Which Defenses Actually Work
AEV shows users where defenses succeed or fail across attack chains by simulating real-world, multi-step attack scenarios across diverse attack vectors. These simulated attacks result in clear, actionable insights into control effectiveness, giving security leaders the critical context they need to identify gaps across all layers of their infrastructure and reveal blind spots that traditional tools often miss.
2. It Provides Insight into Real Exposure for Risk Prioritization
AEV goes beyond identifying theoretical risks by validating real exposures with automated attack simulations against exposed assets on demand. Leveraging a library of updated attack scenarios that emulate evolving TTPs, AEV tools also provide much-needed threat intelligence required to stay aligned with current threats. Because exposures are validated using up-to-date threat intelligence, AEV helps security leaders focus their remediation efforts based on realistic, likely attack paths that could be exploited in their environments.
3. It Scales Offensive Security Teams
AEV helps organizations scale their penetration testing and red teaming operations by automating repeatable attack scenarios. This not only allows their in-house human experts to focus on advanced, strategic testing but does not require them to onboard more high-demand human experts to deploy. AEV behaves like a strategic attacker across your hybrid environment, pivoting, escalating, and attempting to reach critical assets just as they would. Essentially, AEV enables consistent, continuous, broader validation at scale without overextending internal teams or requiring increased headcount.
These benefits result in fewer assumptions, clearer priorities, and better decisions grounded in how attackers actually operate, not how we hope they won’t.
Top Reasons for AEV Adoption
Organizations across the board are adopting AEV for different, albeit equally strategic, reasons. For some, reducing threat exposure is the primary driver. These teams are actively implementing CTEM programs and need AEV to operationalize the continuous validation of exposures.
For others, particularly organizations heavily invested in security tools, internal teams, or external service providers, AEV delivers the valuable data needed to justify changes and demonstrate ROI on their security investments. These leaders leverage AEV insights to make smarter, more confident decisions about resource allocation adjustments across their security stack to improve impact and efficiency.
Whether organizations are aiming to simply reduce exposure or optimize their existing security investments, AEV enables a more proactive, data-driven security solution to achieve both objectives in alignment with CTEM.
Why BreachLock AEV
BreachLock AEV is the first SaaS-based, agentless, Gen AI-powered platform that simulates adversaries across the entire attack surface — internal, external, applications, and APIs — all with zero infrastructure complexity and full control in the hands of users.
BreachLock AEV is SaaS-native, fully delivered through the cloud without the use of agents or hardware, taking only minutes to set up on any standard OS. It offers complete attack coverage with unified testing across hybrid or cloud-native environments, including internal infrastructure and external-facing assets, with web applications and APIs as a core focus rather than an afterthought.
With BreachLock AEV, clients can launch unlimited tests in seconds, with full control over what to test, when, and how. The platform offers visual asset scoping and exclusion, the ability to instantly start or stop a test with kill-switch functionality, and has zero dependency on service teams or deployment windows.
With unlimited testing offered under a single license and no per-test, per-asset, or per-surface pricing complexities, BreachLock AEV scales with your environment without hidden costs.
To learn more about how BreachLock AEV can help drive your CTEM strategy forward, book a discovery call today.
About BreachLock
BreachLock is a global leader in offensive security, delivering scalable and continuous security testing. Trusted by global enterprises, BreachLock provides human-led and AI-powered attack surface management, penetration testing, red teaming, and adversarial exposure validation (AEV) services that help security teams stay ahead of adversaries. With a mission to make proactive security the new standard, BreachLock is shaping the future of cybersecurity through automation, data-driven intelligence, and expert-driven execution.
Know Your Risk. Contact BreachLock today!