How to build an offensive security program from the ground up: start with your business needs and crown jewels, hire the right team for your environment, model threats to find likely attack paths, pick methodologies that work for you, run pilots to test them, then make sure findings actually get fixed.
First you need to understand the business needs, you know, what type of data you're protecting, where the risks may be. You need to get understanding of what assets are even there. Once you've done that, you kind of know what type of team you need to assemble. Is it more web application testers? Is it more network based? It really kind of depends on your industry. But the first thing you need to do is assemble a team, preferably someone with some experience that has been there and done it before. They can help guide you along the way and build out further. Team members, listen to them to figure out, hey, what are the tools that we need from an offensive security standpoint in order to assess and identify those vulnerabilities? And then also threat modeling to kind of figure out where our threat's gonna come from, what do they look like, how does it pertain to the industry that I'm in? And then where are the high risk assets within the organization? So what are the crown jewels of the organization? How are we gonna think about breaking into those systems, systems and extracting that data? Whether it's customer data or proprietary information, you know, what are we protecting and how is it exposed? And then methodologies, you need to have a team that has those right methodologies and put those in place so they can continuously identify vulnerabilities as they come up. Because your business is going to constantly change. So once you have that all figured out, you're going to actually implement testing. And in the testing you're going to, you could do it at a small scale. So say like, you know, you have a few web applications that you want to actually test, you can deploy it there and say, hey, does the methodology work? Learn from the methodology, enhance it, but then also provide your team with the tools they need to deliver that information into the organization. So it's important that you deliver the information clear, concise, and get everyone on board. Also give them the information that they need to fix the vulnerabilities. Because if you just continuously build a rockstar team and they do a great job and they find all these vulnerabilities, but there's no support from them and other departments of the organization to actually fix the vulnerabilities, then what are you doing? Right? So you really need to enable the team to help the rest of the business remediate vulnerabilities so you can be successful.
