Cyber

Computer-room heroism or what I like to refer to as “Cyber Patriotism” is told in the compelling story of The Imitation Game.  Based on the book “The Enigma” by Andrew Hodges, the film tells the story of crafting the first computing machine to decipher the Nazi Enigma code. It is also the story of Alan Turing, the English computer scientist who formalized the concepts of algorithm and computation with his Turing machine and mathematical model of computation.

Today, the cybersecurity space is reliving this story. The bad guys seem to have the upper hand. The malicious hackers, organized crime hackers, nation-sponsored hackers, hacktivists, and wannabes are all after the corporate cyber vulnerabilities.

But if you take a wide angle view of the global cyber warfare picture, you will see a grave asymmetry parallel to The Imitation Game. In today’s cybersecurity world, there is asymmetry in favor of the computerized aggressor vs. the security defender drowning in manual labor.  While all cyber analysts will agree that cyber defense automation must be the next step, CISOs are struggling to achieve it.

For example, the most effective and accepted way of validating your entire array of cybersecurity defenses is penetration testing. This service often performed annually, is done manually. On the other end of the cyber frontier, hackers are using computerized power to launch attacks on every virtual “square inch” of the corporate IT attack surface 24/7. It’s a man vs. machine battle. We simply cannot win in the same way the UK team could not decipher the Enigma code within 24 hours, no matter how many people tried.

The solution can come only in the form of a machine, which can imitate a hacker using computer power to validate the corporate defenses, not just once a year, but 24/7. Making sure that your guard is consistently up and pointing to remediation required in small daily doses rather than once a year is key.

The solution to winning in cyber warfare requires a machine that advances it’s testing to keep pace with the new exploits and hacking methods. It is not based on dated “playbooks” of one’s town consulting firm who struggle to keep up their research and penetration testing tools.

The Imitation Game had a happy ending.  All we need to do is automate our cyber defense validation practices to have one too.

Penetration Testing is the New Turing Machine
How Can Automated Penetration Testing Make Your Company Safer? Watch the Webinar.
Written by: Aviv Cohen
Show all articles by Aviv Cohen
Learn more about automated security validation
Resource center
Get blog updates via email
Trending
Four steps the financial industry can take to cope with their growing attack surface
Four steps the financial industry can take to cope with their growing attack surface

The financial services industry has always been at the forefront of technology adoption, but the 2020 pandemic accelerated the widespread use of mobile banking apps, chat-based customer service, and other digital tools. Adobe’s 2022 FIS Trends Report, for instance, found that more than half of financial services and insurance firms surveyed experienced a notable increase […]

The elephant 🐘 in the cloud
The elephant 🐘 in the cloud

As much as we love the cloud, we fear it as well. We love it because cloud computing services of Amazon, Azure, and Google have transformed operational efficiency and costs, saving us money, time, and alleviating much of the IT burden. We also fear it because as companies moved to the cloud, they found that […]

A new era of tested Cloud Security is here
A new era of tested Cloud Security is here

Cloud computing has fundamentally changed how we operate. It’s efficient and scalable, but it’s not without some problems. Security is the biggest. As we’ve shifted to the cloud, we’ve exposed ourselves to new risks that can’t be ignored. The IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2023 Report points out that 11% of breaches are due […]

Learn more about our platform
Platform