Most organisations invest heavily in cybersecurity technology, but having the right tools doesn’t necessarily mean they will detect, prevent or respond effectively to a real attack.
ANSecurity Threat Emulation puts your security defences to the test using the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used by real-world threat actors. Rather than simply looking for vulnerabilities, we simulate realistic attack activity across your endpoint, identity, cloud and network environments to understand how your security controls — and the people operating them — perform when faced with a genuine threat.
The result is a clear, evidence-based picture of what happens when an attacker gets in, how quickly they are detected, what your security controls prevent, and how effectively your team responds.
Don’t just assume your defences work. Test them.
Traditional penetration testing can be valuable for identifying vulnerabilities, but it doesn’t always tell you how effectively your wider security operation would respond to a determined attacker.
Threat Emulation takes a different approach.
We use realistic attacker behaviour to test your prevention, detection, alerting, investigation, escalation and response capabilities. This can provide valuable insight into technologies such as EDR/XDR, SIEM, firewalls, network security controls and Security Operations Centres (SOCs).
The question isn’t simply:
“Can an attacker exploit this vulnerability?”
It’s:
“If an attacker got in, would we know — and how quickly could we stop them?”
Our security engineers conduct a controlled series of activities based on the behaviour of real-world threat actors and aligned with the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
The engagement begins with an agreed initial access scenario and is then tailored to your organisation, infrastructure and security objectives.
Activities can progress from relatively subtle actions that may only be identified by highly capable analysts through to increasingly obvious activity. This allows us to understand when your defenders detect the activity, how they investigate it, how they escalate it and what action they take.
Depending on the scenario, testing may include:
Every scenario is carefully controlled and designed to provide maximum value without unnecessarily disrupting your business.
Your SOC and security teams know the exercise is taking place and can actively monitor the activity. This provides an opportunity to assess current processes, identify quick wins and understand how effectively your team can track and respond to an active threat.
It can also provide a valuable practical training exercise, allowing your team to experience how your security controls and processes perform during a simulated incident.
Your SOC or third-party security provider is not informed that the exercise is taking place.
This provides a more realistic test of your operational detection and response capabilities and can be particularly valuable when evaluating a third-party SOC or approaching a security services renewal.
It allows you to independently verify whether your provider detects and responds to malicious activity as expected.
Trust is good. Verification is better.
Following the onsite testing, ANSecurity provides a detailed report designed to turn technical findings into practical improvements.
We’ll provide a clear overview of:
Every finding is categorised according to severity:
Critical | High | Medium | Low | Information / Success
We’ll explain what happened, why it matters and what you can do to improve.
Recommendations are designed to be practical and specific. Improvements could involve:
Where appropriate, we’ll provide specific configuration guidance and links to relevant resources so your team can take action.
You’ll receive a detailed timeline showing what our consultants did and, critically, what your security controls saw and when they saw it.
We can compare our activity against telemetry from technologies such as endpoint security, network firewalls and other logging platforms to identify exactly where detection and response succeeded or failed.
There is no generic attack scenario.
Our consultants tailor each Threat Emulation around your environment, security maturity and objectives. We can simulate different levels of threat actor capability and focus testing on the areas that matter most to your organisation.
For more mature environments, this can include sophisticated, multi-stage attack scenarios designed to challenge even well-developed security operations.
The objective is simple: give you an honest picture of how your defences perform against realistic threats.
ANSecurity combines cybersecurity expertise with practical experience across security technologies, infrastructure and real-world environments.
Our consultants don’t simply run a predefined test and hand you a list of vulnerabilities. We work to understand your environment, simulate realistic attack behaviour and analyse what happened across your wider security ecosystem.
Most importantly, we focus on what you can do next.
You’ll leave the engagement with evidence of what worked, where your defences struggled and a prioritised set of recommendations to strengthen your security posture.
