You won’t run your blue team once a year, so why accept this substandard schedule for your offensive?
Cybersecurity teams are under intense pressure to become proactive and find weaknesses in their network before their enemies do so. However, in many organizations, offensive security is still treated as a one-off event. Annual Pentest, Quarterly Red Team Engagement and Compliance pre-deadline audit sprint.
It’s not defense. It’s a theater.
In the real world, enemies are not active in bursts. Their reconnaissance is ongoing, their tools and tactics are constantly evolving, and new vulnerabilities are often reversed to exploits that work within hours of patch releases.
So, if offensive validation is not just dynamic, you are not just delayed, you are exposed.
It’s time to move past the pen test once a year.
It’s time to build an offensive security operations centre.
Why the annual pen test is lacking
Point-in-time penetration testing still plays a role and is here to remain a compliance requirement. However, they are lacking in environments that change faster than can be appreciated. This applies for several reasons:
The scope is limited. Most enterprise pen tests are scoped to avoid business disruption, but we all know that attackers don’t care about your scope or are disrupting your business unless you’re in stealth mode. Controls will gently collapse. The drift is constant. The EDR policy will be loosened. The Siem rules break. And the annual pentests are not built to catch these issues. A security control that you “pass” in a test can fail very often if it is actually important in two weeks. Access escalates quietly. In an active directory environment, false obscurity accumulates quietly over time, with nested groups, old accounts, privileged service identities, and well-known privilege escalation paths common. These are not merely theoretical risks. They have been actively used for decades. Attackers don’t need zero-days to succeed. They rely on weak trust, compositional drift, and lack of vision. Timing delay. By the time the pentest report is delivered, the environment has already changed. You are chasing what you are. It’s like watching a video from the door camera last month and seeing what’s going on today.
However, this is not a call to abolish pen tests.
The exact opposite of manual pentests bring human creativity, contextual awareness, and hostile thinking that automation cannot be replicated.
However, relying solely on them will limit the impact.
By building offensive SOCs and operating ongoing validation, organizations will help the Pentester focus on what is best. Uncover edge cases, creatively bypass defenses, and explore complex scenarios beyond the scope of automation.
In short, offensive SOCs do not replace the pentest, but give room for evolution.
Without continuous verification, security attitudes become snapshots rather than sources of truth.
From point-in-time defense to permanent violations
Attack Security Operations Center (Attack SOC) flips the model every day to a team that continuously manipulates the enemy, from one-off pentests, by thinking and acting like an attacker, as part of an obviously defensive SOC. Instead of waiting to deal with trouble, offensive SOCs are built to be collaborative, transparent, revealing specific risks and driving real-time corrections.
Think about it like this. If a traditional SOC raises an alert to an attack that reaches you, an offensive SOC will raise an alert about possible vulnerabilities.
And the tool that moves it? Throw outdated clipboards, checklists, stop violation and attack simulation (BAS) and auto-penetration testing solutions.
The core pillar of an offensive SOC
1. Continuously discover what is exposed
You cannot verify what you haven’t found. The attack surface of an organization is vast with crowdworkloads, unmanaged assets, shadow IT, old DNS records, and public S3 buckets. Do not cut regular scans anymore.
Discoveries must be permanent and continuous, as attackers do.
2. Real-world attack simulation using BAS
Violation and Attack Simulation (BAS) are not speculated. Simulate real-world TTPS mapped to industry-recognized frameworks such as Miter ATT & CK® across the kill chain.
BAS answers a set of high stakes questions while still being practical.
Can your SIEM catch a qualification dumping attack? Does your EDR block make ransomware known? Does WAF stop important web attacks like Citrix Bleed and Ingressnightmare?
BAS is about controlled, safe production recognition testing that uses the same techniques used by attackers against actual controls without actually putting data, revenue or reputation at risk. BAS shows you exactly what works, what fails, and where to focus your efforts.
3. Take advantage of chain testing with automated pentting
Individual vulnerabilities may not be harmful to you. However, the enemy carefully chains multiple vulnerabilities and false inductions to achieve the target. Automated penetration testing allows security teams to verify how actual compromises can be deployed in stages and staged, end-to-end.
Automated pentting simulates expected violations from domain-binding systems from access to low sovereign or system-level users. From this scaffold, we discover and verify the shortest stealth attack path to critical assets such as domain management privileges by chaining actual techniques such as credentials, lateral movements, and privilege escalation.
Here is an example:
Initial access to the HR workstation exposes opportunities for KerberoAsting caused by incorrect service account permissions. Offline password cracking reveals plain text credentials. These credentials allow for lateral movement to another machine. Ultimately, the simulation captures the NTLM hash of the domain administrator, with no alerts triggered and no control intervening.
This is just one scenario among thousands, but it reflects the real tactics used by enemies to escalate privileges within the network.
4. Drift detection and posture tracking
Security is not static. The rules will be changed. The configuration shifts. The control quietly fails.
An offensive SOC will maintain your score over time. Track when the prevention and detection layer solutions begin to slip, as follows:
An EDR policy update that disables known malware signatures will sign a Siem alert that quietly stops firing after a dominant change.
An offensive SOC not only tells you what you fail, but also tells you when you start to fail.
And here’s how you’re ahead: not by reacting to alerts, but by catching your vulnerabilities before they’re exploited.
Where the Picas fits
PICUS helps security teams operate attack SOCs using a unified platform that continuously validates exposure across the prevention, detection, and response layer.
We combine:
A BAS to test how your control responds to real-world threats. Automatic penetration tests to simulate attacker movements after access and identify high-risk paths. A known threat and mitigation library for simulating attacks and simulating gaps faster. Seamless integration with existing SOC stacks.
And Picas isn’t just a promise. Blue Report 2024 discovered:
Organizations using PICU have reduced critical vulnerabilities by more than 50%. Customers doubled the effectiveness of prevention in 90 days. The team used Picus to ease the security gap 81% faster.
Picus allows you to boldly move beyond assumptions and make decisions backed by verification.
That’s the value of an offensive SOC: intensive, efficient and continuous security improvements.
Final Thoughts: Verification is not a report, it is a practice
Building an offensive SOC is not about adding dashboards, solutions or noise. It’s about transforming the Reactive Security Operations Center into a continuous verification engine.
It means proof of what is exploitable, what is protected, and what needs attention.
Picus helps security teams do it accurately and helps them operate validation across the stack.
Ready to explore the details?
Download the CISO guide on security and exposure verification below.
Understand the complementary role of violating and attack simulation and automated penetration testing Learn how to prioritize risk based on exploitability, as well as how to embed hostile exposure validation in CTEM strategies for continuous and measurable improvement
Get the exporment exposure verification guide and create a part of the verification of everyday SOC operations, as well as what you check from the list once a year.
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