Attack Path Validation

Discover and prioritize high-risk exposures with automated penetration testing and attack path mapping.

attack path validation explained

Visualize and Remediate Exploitable High-risk Attack Paths in Your Environment

Attack Path Management is the continuous process of discovering, visualizing, validating, and eliminating the paths attackers could use to reach critical assets. It helps security teams disrupt the stealthiest routes adversaries will take to achieve their objectives, such as domain admin access or ransomware deployment.

Picus Attack Path Validation (APV) supports this effort by identifying security misconfigurations and validating their exploitability under real-world conditions. It reveals how attackers can chain together weaknesses to compromise endpoints, such as servers, workstations, users, and other critical assets in the organization's directory environment, such as Windows Active Directory.

By validating attack paths through automated penetration testing, Picus APV reveals where vulnerabilities intersect across multiple paths, highlighting critical choke points. This enables security teams to execute precise, risk-based remediation that cuts through noise, minimizes downtime, and strengthens defenses where it matters most.

 

From One Click to Total Takeover

See How an Attacker Can Reach
Domain Admin in 7 Steps

Picus Attack Path Validation mimics real attacker behavior to uncover your most critical paths to crown-jewel assets like Domain Admin accounts. This red team emulation shows how credentials are stolen, cracked, and used to escalate privileges—step by step. In just minutes, security teams gain actionable visibility into where attackers could succeed and where to focus their defenses.

Find Potential Attack Paths with Automated Penetration Testing

Picus APV identifies how attackers chain misconfigurations and weaknesses to move laterally and reach your crown jewels. Through automated penetration testing, it emulates and simulates real attack techniques to validate paths that scanners inherently miss, proving what is truly exploitable in your environment.

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attack path mapping

Attack Path Mapping

Discover and visualize high-risk attack paths to understand how attackers could achieve their ultimate objective. Simulate ransomware or identify lateral movement leading to domain admin privileges to stop adversaries.

Why Attack Path Validation?

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Reveals and validates paths to critical assets.
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Provides a broad view of high-risk attack paths.
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Helps prioritize vulnerabilities.
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Enables Active Directory hardening.
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Automates manual red teaming.
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Tests security control effectiveness.

Reasons to Choose the Picus Platform for
Attack Path Validation

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Identify how attackers escalate privileges, dump credentials, and move laterally across domain-joined endpoints and users. Picus APV maps high-risk attack paths to reveal how adversaries reach their end goal — domain admin access in your Active Directory environment.

Picus APV goes beyond discovery by validating attack paths through the exploitation of real misconfigurations and weaknesses. It chains attack vectors such as credential harvesting, Kerberoasting, and lateral movement to confirm which paths pose a true risk to your security posture. In doing so, it highlights your most critical exposure points and reveals the potential impact of each validated attack path.

Picus APV is driven by the Intelligent Decision Engine that mirrors the decision-making of a real attacker. It dynamically selects and chains techniques such as reconnaissance, privilege escalation, and credential access to reach defined objectives in the stealthiest and most evasive way possible, with minimal noise.

So you can harden your network security and eliminate attack paths, APV supplies helpful insights to mitigate the impact of any actions it is able to perform during an assessment.

Tailor simulations to your requirements by defining a scope and by selecting the type of harvesting and access actions that can be leveraged by the product's decision engine to achieve an objective.

With no agents to install and configure in your environment, it’s easy to get started with Picus Attack Path Validation. After scoping an assessment, all you need to do is execute a binary on an initial access point.

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Harden Active Directory

Continuous assessment of Active Directory security is vital since an attacker that has gained domain admin privileges can access all of an organization’s systems, users, and data.

Picus Attack Path Validation enhances internal attack surface validation by identifying and addressing the shortest attack paths within an organization. This ensures that, even after an attacker gains initial access, opportunities for privilege escalation, lateral movement, and exploitation of critical systems are proactively mitigated, reducing the likelihood of a breach causing major business-impacting incidents.

Simulate Ransomware Indicators

Replicate the impact of potential ransomware attacks by simulating the encryption and exfiltration of sensitive files. 

Determine common or custom file types to include in your simulation and test the risk post by unauthorized access. Quickly take next steps with key findings, simulation summaries and recommendations.

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USE CASES

Address Challenges with Security Validation

See and prioritize exposures across your security operations.
Automated Penetration
Testing

Stay on top of exposures while alleviating manual testing requirements.

Adversarial Exposure
Validation

Improve decision making with a holistic view of your security posture.

Breach and
Attack
Simulation

Simulate attacks to measure and optimize security controls.

Awarded By The Industry

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Customer's  Choice

2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Breach and Attack Simulation

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Cyber Security Excellence Awards

2024 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards – Most Innovative Cybersecurity Company

Customer Reviews

RESOURCES

Latest Attack Path Validation Resources

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See the
Picus Security Validation Platform

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Frequently Asked Questions

An attack path is a route an attacker, that breached a network, could take to achieve an objective. Due to the size of IT environments and the rate at which they grow, most organizations have thousands of potential attack paths. Left undiscovered and unmanaged, high-risk attack paths could enable attackers to compromise critical users and assets quickly and easily.

Attack Path Management is a term used in cyber security to describe the discovery, visualization and elimination of attack paths. By remediating vulnerabilities and addressing misconfigurations inside a network, security teams are able to reduce the number of available paths to critical assets as well as increase the effort required by attackers to reach them.

By automatically discovering and visualizing attack paths inside a network, attack path mapping tools help security teams to understand how attackers could compromise critical users and assets. In doing so, attack path mapping tools reveal vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and provide insights to remediate them.

Examples of common exposures that attackers can exploit once inside a network include excessive user privileges, inadequate network partitioning and unpatched vulnerabilities in systems.

Yes. In order to aid the successful completion of an objective, Picus APV can simulate lateral movement actions. Lateral movement actions that can be simulated include pass-the-hash and pass-the-ticket.

Like red teaming exercises, Picus Attack Path Validation is designed to achieve a certain objective. However, whereas manual red team assessments can take months to perform and deliver results, Picus APV can provide insights in minutes.

By automating attack path mapping, Picus APV enables security teams to run simulations from multiple initial access points quickly and easily. The result is a more holistic view and greater insights to help prioritize the remediation of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.