Offensive Vs. Defensive Security: How They Work

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.

Defining offensive security

With offensive security, you can use methods like penetration testing to find weaknesses in your network before hackers exploit them. Here's how:

• Define the goal you want to achieve with testing.
• Use scanning tools to find how an application code will respond to attacks.
• Once you know the vulnerable points, try to exploit them. For example, you may use SQL injection to steal online assets.
• Prepare a report on vulnerabilities and their impact.

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.)

Steps involved in offensive security

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:

1. Reconnaissance: The first step is to monitor any suspicious activities in an organization. Here, ethical hackers collect more information about vulnerable points in the systems to expose the areas that can be easily scanned and compromised.
2. Scanning defense: Next, they install security systems like firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDS) to identify and stop these scans.
3. Access control: Then, they use strong access controls to ensure proper security against unauthorized access. For this purpose, most businesses rely on identity and access management (IAM) systems, which is why this market generated $16.17bn in revenue in 2023.
4. Maintain security: Continuous monitoring and response are essential to offensive security. For this, you can use the most reliable threat intelligence software in your industry.

Challenges with offensive security

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:

General constraints

Offensive security operations, like penetration testing, may face these few limitations:

• Challenging to gain access to the system of the entire organization.
• May face false positives by focusing on points that are not vulnerable.
• Disrupt normal business activities.

Costly process

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:

• They use expensive tools and techniques.
• They don't receive public recognition for their work.
• They may face legal charges - that's what happened to Malta's white hackers and their lecturer.

So, if you want to conduct thorough penetration tests, it's time to increase your security budget.

Identifying unknown attacks

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.

Defining defensive security

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:

• Teams set up network security devices, such as firewalls, to minimize unwanted traffic access.
• Then, they monitor networks to detect any incidents.
• If any incident occurs, they swiftly mitigate it to minimize the damage in a data breach.

Steps involved in defensive security

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:

• Assess risk: Identify the type of attack-is it phishing, DDoS, or some other kind? After identification, assess the associated risks and their potential impact. For instance, malware was the top attack most businesses faced in 2024.
• Mitigate: To minimize downtime, respond to this incident as early as possible. In 2023, the forensic investigations took an average of 33 days. You should aim to do it in less time.
• Create a policy: Next, draft a clear policy to mitigate the identified attacks in the future. You could include tactics such as using strong passwords or turning off certain file types. For example, you might develop a policy that blocks .exe files.
• Implementation: The last step is to implement the security policies. For example, if your policy blocks a certain file type, implement it across all user devices.

Challenges with defensive security

Most businesses rely on defensive security to protect sensitive data and mitigate attacks. However, you may face these challenges while taking preventive actions:

Skill gaps

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:

• Offer attractive salaries and perks.
• Hire trained ones who want to build a career in cybersecurity.
• Consider them as an asset and invest in their training.

Trust issues

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.

Limited resources

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.

Best practices for offensive and defensive security

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:

• Backup data regularly: It adds an extra layer of security, allows you to minimize downtime, and prevents permanent data loss.
• Monitor third-party access: You should not give third-party tools access to the entire architecture. Instead, give role-based access and keep monitoring any malicious activities.
• Employee training: Due to the cybersecurity market skill gap, investing in employee training is extremely important. For example, you can train your team on why they shouldn't open suspicious links. This way, you know you're working with a security-aware team.
• Consider it an investment: Don't see cybersecurity as a cost but an investment. When customers see that protecting their data is your priority, they will want to work with you.

Sum up

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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