Security does not fail at the point of breach. It fails at the moment of impact.
This sentence set the tone for this year’s Picus Breach and Simulation (BAS) Summit. There, researchers, practitioners, and CISOs all echoed the same theme: Cyber defense is no longer about prediction. It’s about the evidence.
When a new exploit is dropped, scanners search the internet within minutes. Once the attacker gains a foothold, lateral movement often follows just as quickly. If your controls aren’t tested against the exact technique you’re playing, you’re not defending and hoping things don’t go seriously pear-shaped.
This is why the pressure builds long before an incident report is written. At the same time that the exploit hit Twitter, boardrooms are demanding answers. “You can’t say to a board, ‘We’ll have an answer next week,'” said one speaker. We have hours, not days. ”
BAS has moved beyond its compliance roots to become cybersecurity’s daily voltage test, a test that runs an electric current through the stack to see what it’s actually holding.
This article is not a suggestion or explanation. This is a summary of what was covered on stage, and essentially shows how BAS has evolved from an annual check-box activity to a simple, effective, everyday way to prove that defenses actually work.
Security is about reaction, not design
For decades, security has been treated like an architecture: design, build, test, and certify. A checklist approach built on planning and documentation.
However, the attackers never agreed to that plan. They treat defense like physics, continually applying pressure until something bends or breaks. They don’t care what is written on the blueprint. They care about where the structure breaks.
Penetration testing is still important, but it’s a snapshot in progress.
BAS has changed that equation. We do not guarantee the design. Stress test your reactions. Perform safe and controlled adversarial operations in a real environment to prove whether your defenses actually respond as expected.
Chris Dale, lead instructor at SANS, explains: The difference is mechanical. BAS measures response, not potential. Don’t ask, “Where are the vulnerabilities?” But, “What happens if I hit you?”
Because ultimately, you don’t lose when a breach occurs, you lose when the impact of that breach is felt.
True defense begins with knowing yourself.
Before you can emulate/simulate your enemy, you need to understand yourself. You can’t protect what you can’t see: forgotten assets, untagged accounts, and legacy scripts still running with domain administrator privileges.
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Next, imagine a breach and work backwards from the outcome you fear most.
For example, Akira is a ransomware chain that deletes backups, exploits PowerShell, and spreads through shared drives. By safely reproducing that behavior in your environment, you can learn whether your defenses can break through it along the way, rather than guessing.
There are two principles that distinguish mature programs from the rest.
Results first: Start with impact, not inventory. Purple by default: BAS is not a red and blue theater. It’s how Intel, Engineering, and Operations converge: Simulate → Observe → Adjust → Resimulate.
“Teams that make testing a weekly cadence will start seeing evidence where they expected it to be,” said John Sapp, CISO at Texas Mutual Insurance.
AI’s real job is curation, not creation.
AI has been everywhere this year, but the most valuable insights aren’t about power, they’re about restraint. Speed is important, but provenance is even more important. No one wants an LLM model that improvises payloads or guesses attack behavior.
At least for now, the most useful type of AI is not one that creates, but rather one that organizes, taking messy, unstructured threat intelligence and turning it into something that defenders can actually use.
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AI now works less like a single model and more like a relay of specialists, each with specific jobs and checkpoints in between.
Planner — Define what you need to collect. Researchers — Validate and enrich threat data. Builder — Structure information into secure emulation plans. Validator — Checks fidelity before doing something.
Each agent is reviewed at the end to keep accuracy high and risk low.
One example sums it up perfectly.
“Give me a link to the Fin8 campaign and I’ll show you the MITER techniques it maps in hours, not days.”
It is no longer a wish, but a reality. What once took a week of manual cross-referencing, scripting, and validation can now fit into a single work day.
Heading → Emulation Planning → Secure Execution. It’s not flashy, just fast. Again, hours, not days.
Prove that BAS works in the field
One of the most anticipated sessions at the event was a live showcase of BAS in a real-world environment. It was operational evidence, not theory.
The medical team ran a ransomware chain aligned with sector threat intelligence, measured time to detection and time to response, and fed undetected information back into SIEM and EDR rules until the chain was broken early.
The insurance company demonstrated a BAS pilot over the weekend to verify whether endpoint quarantines were actually triggered. These executions exposed silent misconfigurations long before the attacker discovered them.
The point was clear.
BAS is no longer a laboratory experiment; it is already part of everyday security operations. When leaders ask, “Are we protected from this?” the answer comes from evidence, not opinion.
Validation changes “Patch everything” to “Patch what matters”
One of the most poignant moments at the summit came when the familiar board question surfaced: “Do we need to patch everything?”
The answer was unapologetically clear: “No.”
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BAS-led validation has proven that patching everything is not just impractical. It’s unnecessary.
The key is knowing which vulnerabilities are actually exploitable in your environment. Combining vulnerability data with live control performance allows security teams to see where real risks are concentrated, not where scoring systems tell them to.
“You shouldn’t patch everything,” says Volkan Ertürk, co-founder and CTO of Picus. “Leverage control validation to get a prioritized list of exposures and focus on the ones that are truly exploitable.”
While CVSS 9.8 poses little risk when protected by validated prevention and detection, medium-severity flaws in exposed systems can open up real attack vectors.
The shift from a patchwork of assumptions to a patchwork of evidence was one of the defining moments of the event. BAS doesn’t tell you what’s wrong where. Here’s what can hurt you, turning Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) from theory to strategy.
You don’t need a moonshot to get started
Another important takeaway from the session with Picus security architecture leaders Gürsel Arıcı and Autumn Stambaugh was that BAS does not require large-scale deployments. You just need to start.
The team started with much fanfare and fanfare, proving its worth in weeks rather than quarters.
In most cases, you selected one or two scopes, financial endpoints, or production clusters and mapped the controls that protect them. We then chose a realistic outcome, such as data encryption, and built the smallest TTP chain that could achieve it. Run safely, see where prevention or detection failed, fix what matters, and run again.
In fact, the loop accelerated rapidly.
By the third week, the AI-assisted workflow was already updating threat information and regenerating safe actions. By the fourth week, verified management data and vulnerability findings were combined into an exposure scorecard that executives could read at a glance.
The moment the team saw a simulated kill chain stall mid-execution due to a rule shipped the day before, everything clicked and BAS stopped being a project and became part of daily security practice.
BAS functions as a verb within CTEM
Gartner’s Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) model: Assess, Validate, Mobilize only works if validation is continuous, contextual, and tied to action.
This is where BAS lives now.
This is not a standalone tool. This is the engine that keeps CTEM honest, provides exposure scores, guides control engineering, and maintains agility as both the technology stack and threat surface change.
The best teams run validation like a heartbeat. Every change, every patch, every new CVE triggers another pulse. That’s what continuous validation actually means.
The future lies in proof
Security used to operate on beliefs. BAS replaces belief with evidence and sends current through the defense circuit to see where the circuit is failing.
AI brings speed. Automation brings scale. Verification brings truth. BAS is no longer a way to talk about security. That’s how you prove it.
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Note: This article was professionally written and contributed by Sila Ozeren Hacioglu, Security Research Engineer at Picus Security.
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