Can an attacker reach what matters to your business?
Attack Path Security Validation (APSV) shows how ordinary weaknesses combine across identity, cloud, network, applications and suppliers to reach a critical business service. It also tests whether your controls stop them. This whitepaper explains how the methodology works and how to start.
Most penetration tests end with a list of findings, each scored on its own. That leaves leadership with an unanswered question: could someone get to our most important systems, and would we know if they tried? This paper explains how APSV connects testing results to that question, and how the evidence supports decisions about investment, risk and remediation.
What’s Inside
- The assurance gap. Six reasons why point-in-time, system-by-system testing leaves leadership without a clear view of business exposure.
- The six-stage APSV methodology. The process starts by agreeing on the business capability that matters. It then maps and validates the attack paths that lead to it, and ends by retesting after remediation.
- A worked attack path. An example of how an MFA bypass, a conditional-access gap, weak privilege controls, failed segmentation and a data-loss gap combine into one route to operational disruption.
- Ten business outcomes. These include directing remediation spend toward the fixes that break attack paths, avoiding unnecessary technology purchases, and reusing validated paths to lower the cost of retesting.
- How to start with one path. A scoped trial on a single critical service that ends with a retest of the exact route.