Picus vs Cymulate

Picus validates your security controls and provides vendor-specific mitigation content for both the prevention and detection layers of your selected vendor's security controls. This helps you quickly address gaps and continuously optimize your security posture.

Cymulate's lack of vendor-specific mitigation and reliance on generic recommendations require extensive manual research on the client side, placing an operational burden on SOC and security teams and offering less overall value.

Swift Response to Emerging
Threats

Picus Labs researchers ensure the rapid incorporation of emerging threats, adding them to the Picus Threat Library within 24 hours under a guaranteed SLA, provided there is a publicly available PoC. By focusing on threats highlighted in US-CERT and CISA alerts, this quick response keeps our clients' defenses up-to-date and highly responsive.

Cymulate's platform, on the other hand, lags in incorporating new threats, often taking days post-disclosure, which significantly decreases the objective of simulating these threats.

Unrivaled Customer Experience

Picus is praised by our customers for its ease of implementation and operation. Integrating with your existing tools takes just a few clicks, and if assistance is needed, the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) team is just a call or email away.

In contrast, Cymulate poses challenges for particularly smaller security teams trying to leverage its full potential. Integrations are cumbersome to manage, and navigating the results requires significant expertise. Additionally, despite implementing broad, risky exclusions for the Cymulate agent, smooth coexistence with existing solutions is not guaranteed and compatibility issues may still arise.

Picus

Cymulate

Simulation Accuracy

Simulations provide a true reflection of your security posture. Results remain consistent across multiple simulations runs.

Cymulate

Simulations result lack integrity and provide false positives, which is pointed out by Cymulate’s customer statements. Simulation results also vary across simulation runs, undermining their reliability.

Actionable Insights

A mitigation library with over 80,000 vendor-specific mitigation content including prevention signatures, log source recommendations, and detection rules to deliver the most relevant and actionable simulations for SOC teams.

Cymulate

not-available-for-The lack of vendor-specific mitigation content, context, and guidance in the provided results means that sound expertise is required to derive actionable insights.<br><br>Smaller security teams, in particular, struggle to get real value from using Cymulate.

The lack of vendor-specific mitigation content, context, and guidance in the provided results means that sound expertise is required to derive actionable insights.

Smaller security teams, in particular, struggle to get real value from using Cymulate.

Response to Emerging Threats

The Picus Labs team is committed to researching the latest attack techniques observed in the wild and developing effective mitigation practices. As a result, newly emerging threats with publicly available PoCs are added to our platform within a 24-hour SLA. This rapid response, particularly for threats highlighted in US-CERT and CISA alerts, ensures our clients' defenses remain up-to-date and highly responsive.

Picus threat library provides more than 5700 real-world threats, comprising more than 24,000 attack actions covering all major OS families (Windows, Linux, macOS) as well as cloud-specific attack techniques.

Picus Breach and Attack Simulation threat library provides more than 5700 real-world threats, comprising more than 24,000 attack actions covering all major OS families (Windows, Linux, macOS) as well as cloud-specific attack techniques.

Cymulate

Cymulate's platform lags in incorporating new threats, often taking days post-disclosure. This diminishes the effectiveness of simulations as customers’ security gaps remain unaddressed during an active exploitation campaign.

Even after incorporating the threat, customers need a paid subscription to access the 'immediate threats' module.

Platform Stability

Picus agents operate seamlessly in the background, ensuring high platform stability through robust development and proactive monitoring. However, in case of any issues, Picus’s Technical Assistance Center (TAC) team responds swiftly to resolve them, minimizing downtime and ensuring continuous operation without requiring frequent maintenance.

Cymulate

Cymulate’s platform often faces agent breakdowns and integration failures, necessitating frequent re-installs and troubleshooting, questions its reliability.

This not only creates performance issues, but puts manual effort for maintenance on security teams.

Increase Detection Efficacy

The Picus approach helps validate detection coverage by automatically validating both log and alert generation as part of every attack simulation. This is made possible through an extensive keyword dictionary providing a mapping of every activity to the expected log information

Cymulate

Cymulate’s detection automation only provides a limited keyword dictionary.

Moreover, Cymulate does not follow proper attribution when it comes to detection efficacy. After their simulation is executed, they pull all logs and put them in a "bucket", they do not map to each individual objective. Makes for a manual effort to figure all the logs out.

Automate Detection Rule Maintenance

With Picus Detection Rule Validation, SOC/security teams can ensure detection rule health, verify log source coverage, and identify performance inefficiencies, eliminating the manual effort required for SIEM maintenance.

Moreover, using AI-supported mapping of existing detection rules to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, security teams get a unique view on their detection coverage.

Cymulate

not-available-for-Customers need to engage with professional services because the tool is too cumbersome to deploy and manage. Reportedly, this often leads to a subpar implementation experience.

Cymulate doesn’t provide this innovative capability, placing a significant burden of manual and resource-intensive maintenance on security teams.

Customer Experience

"Picus offers a user-friendly interface and streamlined operational processes, significantly reducing the learning curve for new users. This ease of use is highly appreciated by professionals in the field, as highlighted by a Network Security Engineer at a major bank who noted “Picus products have easy usage, great experience and efficient simulations. They have a great support team. Leading company.”

– Network Security Engineer in Banking

Cymulate

Customer feedback highlights a significant usability challenge with Cymulate, indicating that the platform is not as intuitive or straightforward to navigate and operationalize as desired.

This lack of user-friendliness often compels customers to seek professional services for deployment and management, as they find the tool too cumbersome to handle on their own. As a result, many users report a subpar implementation experience.

Seamless Integration with Existing Technology Stack

Picus seamlessly integrates with 50+ technologies including NGFW, WAF, EDR, SIEM, CTI, SOAR and more.Continued testing and fine-tuning ensures that Picus integrates well with existing EPP technologies, avoiding the exclusion of entire directories.By providing specific mitigation recommendations for a majority of these technologies, Picus helps you to increase the overall ROI of your existing security investments.

Cymulate

Many Cymulate users report issues with the integration of the platform into their environment. Despite implementing broad, risky exclusions for the Cymulate agent, smooth coexistence with existing solutions is not guaranteed.

Non Risky and More Reliable WAF Testing

Picus sends malicious payloads to its agents instead of customer's web applications, avoiding potential harm and ensuring performance stability.

Cymulate

Cymulate's approach of sending malicious payloads directly to customers' web applications can potentially damage these applications, risking denial of service and performance issues.Moreover, since the payloads are sent directly to the web application itself, the simulation results are not only affected by the WAF's response but also by the web application and the server, thereby compromising the reliability of the simulation.

Actionability of Threat Intelligence (TI)

Picus offers threat templates based on an organization’s sector, country, and region, utilizing Threat Intelligence. Additionally, Picus filters results to match threats identified through the organization's third-party CTI integrations

Cymulate

Cymulate faces challenges in making TI actionable for users. Absence of TI-led attack templates.

More Accurate MITRE ATT&CK Simulations and Heatmap

Picus ensures that each simulated ATT&CK technique is based on the specific Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) associated with that technique, rather than merely simulating the writing of a known malicious file to disk and generalizing this to assume that all related techniques to the malicious file are also blocked.

Cymulate

Cymulate’s approach to simulating MITRE ATT&CK techniques involves significant oversimplification by equating the prevention of a "known malicious file written to disk" with blocking all associated ATT&CK techniques of that file. For example, if a malicious file contains 40 TTPs, preventing its download is mistakenly considered as preventing all 40 TTPs. This creates a serious problem, leading to a false sense of security.

Always Up-to-Date MITRE ATT&CK Heatmap

Picus continuously updates its MITRE ATT&CK heatmap to include only current and relevant techniques, ensuring accurate and up-to-date security insights

Cymulate

Cymulate's MITRE ATT&CK heatmap includes deprecated techniques, which were outdated years ago. This inclusion of obsolete methods questions the relevance and accuracy of the ATT&CK coverage measurement.

Data Residency

Picus will always respect your data!You decide where your data resides, be it in the secured Picus environment or your own on premise with easy deployment or cloud environment. In either case, logs from your systems are always analyzed locally and never exported to the cloud.

Cymulate

Cymulate’s on-premise option is only available with a complex and costly workaround.

In addition, Cymulate only provides limited support for on-prem deployments, eliminating a lot of use cases in regulated industries.

Pricing Model

A variety of bundles allow for a simple buying experience tailored to your use case.

Cymulate

Cymulate’s pricing includes separate charges for every module, for simulation agents, for emerging threats and professional service hours; leaving you feeling nickel-and-dimed.

What Our Customers Say

5.0

June 27, 2021

It is a game-changer!

''Although we always used pen-test and other assessment practices, none of them gave us the depth and width we need to understand our security posture against the possible attack scenarios extensively. The Picus Platform was a game changer.''