Breach and Attack Simulation vs. Penetration Testing

Security validation is often discussed as a single practice, but in reality it consists of distinct approaches designed to answer very different questions. 

This blog clarifies the differences between penetration testing, red teaming, and Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), then provides a structured comparison of BAS and penetration testing to explain their design intent, strengths, limitations, and how they complement one another in modern security programs.

Understanding the Human-led Approaches: Penetration Testing vs Red Teaming

Before diving into a competitive analysis of BAS tools and penetration testing practices, it’s important to clarify what penetration testing is and how it differs from red teaming. In practice, these two are often confused or used interchangeably, despite serving fundamentally different purposes. Understanding this distinction is essential before comparing tools or approaches.

Red Teaming Explained

Red teaming takes an adversary-centric approach to security testing, focused on simulating how real attackers operate against an organization. Rather than testing individual controls or hunting for isolated vulnerabilities, red team exercises model full attack campaigns designed to challenge detection, response, and resilience.

Red team engagements typically focus on:

• Emulating advanced adversary behavior, including the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by APT groups, ransomware operators, and sophisticated malware campaigns.
• Executing end-to-end attack kill chains, where operators replicate how attackers plan, adapt, establish persistence, move laterally, and pursue objectives within a live environment.

Note that red teaming is not about producing lists of findings. The goal is to construct credible, end-to-end attack kill chains and observe how security controls, processes, and people respond over time. As a result, red team engagements are typically broader in scope and longer in duration than traditional penetration tests.

Through this approach, red teaming provides a high-fidelity view of an organization’s true defensive readiness by answering a fundamental question:

Penetration Testing Explained

Penetration testing is a targeted security assessment designed to identify and exploit vulnerabilities within a defined system, network, or application. It focuses on discovering technical weaknesses and demonstrating how those weaknesses could be abused by an attacker within a limited scope and timeframe.

Penetration testing typically involves:

• Identifying security weaknesses within the approved scope, such as vulnerable software, misconfigurations, or exposed services.
• Exploiting those weaknesses to demonstrate potential impact, including initial access or limited attack paths an attacker could follow after exploitation.

Penetration testing is usually a planned, point-in-time activity with a clearly defined scope. Engagements are shorter in duration and narrower in focus compared to red teaming. The results primarily consist of vulnerability findings paired with generic remediation guidance, such as applying patches, upgrading software versions, or correcting insecure configurations.

Rather than evaluating how well an organization detects or responds to attacks, penetration testing concentrates on validating the presence and exploitability of security weaknesses. It answers a different, more tactical question:

Comparative Overview: Penetration Testing vs Red Teaming

The comparison below outlines how these two practices differ in scope, execution, and the type of security questions they answer.

Penetration testing focuses on identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities within a defined scope. It is typically performed as a point-in-time assessment to determine which technical weaknesses exist and how they could be exploited.

Red teaming focuses on simulating realistic adversary behavior across the attack lifecycle. It evaluates how well security controls, processes, and people detect and respond to sustained attack campaigns carried out by capable threat actors.

Feature Comparison Table

Summary

• Penetration testing answers “What vulnerabilities exist and how can they be exploited?”
• Red teaming answers “How effectively can we detect, respond to, and disrupt a real attacker over time?”

Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) Explained

Breach and Attack Simulation is a security validation approach that continuously and safely tests how well an organization’s existing security controls perform against real-world cyberattacks.

Rather than searching for vulnerabilities in isolation, BAS assessments recreate how real attackers operate by simulating realistic attack techniques and behaviors observed in the wild, such as malware activity and known threat actor campaigns, across the full attack lifecycle. This includes stages such as initial access, discovery, lateral movement, privilege escalation, persistence, command-and-control, and impact. These simulations are modeled on adversary tactics and techniques documented in frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK.

Crucially, BAS simulations are safe, non-destructive and controlled. They do not exploit systems in a way that causes outages or data loss. Instead, they validate whether existing prevention and detection layer controls, including firewalls, WAFs, email security, IPS/IDS, EDR/XDR, and SIEM, actually block, detect, log, and alert on attack behavior in production environments.

Figure 1. Testing Prevention and Detection Layer Solutions with BAS

By executing these simulations repeatedly and automatically, BAS answers practical questions that traditional assessments cannot reliably address:

• Would this attack actually succeed in our environment?
• Which security controls stop it, and which silently fail?
• Are our detections firing early enough to limit impact?

The results expose real, exploitable gaps in security controls rather than theoretical weaknesses. BAS also highlights where controls are already effective, helping teams avoid unnecessary remediation and focus effort where it truly reduces risk.

Now that we have covered penetration testing and breach and attack simulation individually, it's time for the comparative analysis. In the upcoming section, we will compare these security assessment solutions based on various aspects.

Breach and Attack Simulation vs Penetration Testing

BAS and penetration testing are both essential security assessment approaches, but they serve different purposes within a modern security program.

While penetration testing focuses on discovering exploitable weaknesses at a specific point in time, BAS is designed to continuously validate whether existing security controls actually prevent and detect real-world attacks. These differences become especially clear when comparing automation, scope, safety, and the type of outcomes each method delivers.

In this section, we delve deeper into three core characteristics that distinctly set BAS apart from penetration testing. This analysis aims to provide not just an overview, but an in-depth understanding of these differing methodologies.

• Design Intent and Scale: BAS vs. Penetration Testing

• Security Control Assessment: Integrating BAS into Defense-in-Depth Strategy

• Actionable Insights with Mitigation Library: A Comparative View of BAS and Penetration Testing

First, we are going to take the comparison from the “Threat Library” perspective.

Design Intent and Scale: BAS vs Penetration Testing

The core difference between BAS and penetration testing is not who understands threats better, but what each approach is designed to validate at scale.

BAS platforms are engineered to continuously validate security control behavior. To achieve this, they rely on a structured catalog of attack techniques that can be executed safely, repeatedly, and consistently. These techniques are used as test inputs, not threat predictions, to verify whether deployed prevention and detection controls behave as expected across different environments and attack vectors. Automation and repeatability allow BAS to assess security controls over time without increasing operational effort.

Penetration testing serves a different design goal. It is a manual, human-led assessment performed within a predefined scope and timeframe, with the objective of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities. Penetration testing is optimized for depth of analysis, not breadth or continuity. It is not designed to provide systematic, ongoing validation of security control effectiveness across layers.

As a result, penetration testing typically:

• Is limited to systems and attack paths explicitly defined in scope
• Exercises a small number of vulnerabilities to demonstrate exploitability
• Does not cover the full attack lifecycle
• Produces point-in-time results rather than continuous validation

Each penetration test represents a snapshot of exposure under specific conditions. Findings do not automatically extend as environments change or as validation needs evolve.

Targeting Multiple Security Controls in Defense-in-Depth Strategy with BAS

Defense-in-depth relies on multiple security controls working together across layers (network, endpoint, application, data, and cross-layer systems like SIEM/XDR). 

BAS and penetration testing contribute differently to validating this model.

Where BAS Fits Best

BAS is designed to systematically validate control performance by running controlled attack simulations and recording outcomes such as:

• Whether traffic or execution is blocked (prevention)
• Whether telemetry is generated (logging)
• Whether alerts trigger as expected (detection)
• How results trend over time (repeatability)

This makes BAS well suited for environments where the goal is to continuously verify that controls remain effective despite configuration changes, policy drift, and evolving threats.

Where Penetration Testing Fits Best

Penetration testing is designed to identify and demonstrate exploitable weaknesses within a defined scope. 

The primary output is typically:

• Verified vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
• Exploitation evidence and business impact
• Remediation guidance focused on fixes (patching, hardening, architectural changes)

A penetration test may include observations about defensive controls, such as whether alerts were generated or logs were produced, but this is typically incidental rather than a primary objective and varies by engagement design. 

Penetration testing is generally not intended to be stealthy; it often involves active scanning, exploitation attempts, and traffic generation that can place measurable load on networks and systems. As a result, penetration tests are not structured to provide systematic, control-by-control validation of prevention and detection effectiveness across the security stack.

Practical Difference in a Defense-in-Depth Program

• Use penetration testing to understand what is exploitable in a specific scope and what impact an attacker could achieve.
• Use BAS to understand how reliably your deployed controls prevent and detect known attack techniques across layers, and to measure improvement over time.

Summary: penetration testing provides depth on exploitability; BAS provides breadth and repeatability for security control validation across defense layers.

Vendor-Based Mitigation Signatures: BAS vs Penetration Testing

A fundamental advantage of BAS over traditional penetration testing lies in how validation results are translated into mitigation actions.

BAS solutions are designed to close the gap between identifying a security weakness and applying an effective defensive response. Rather than stopping at detection of gaps, BAS platforms provide ready-to-use mitigation content that aligns directly with deployed security controls.

Mitigation Capabilities in BAS

Modern BAS platforms, such as the Picus Security Mitigation Library, deliver mitigation guidance in two complementary forms:

Vendor-based mitigation content

• Custom prevention signatures for specific security products such as NGFW, IPS, and WAF
• Vendor-specific detection rules for SIEM and EDR technologies
• Mitigation metadata including block rate, action count, security score, and applicable ATT&CK techniques

Figure 1. Picus Security Control Validation, Prevention Rule Content

Vendor-neutral mitigation content

• Generic mitigation recommendations and security best practices
• Open-source detection logic (for example, SIGMA rules)
• Log source recommendations to improve visibility and detection coverage

Figure 1. Picus Security Control Validation, Detection Rule Content

This approach allows organizations to implement compensating controls quickly when patching is delayed or operationally infeasible, particularly during active threat campaigns targeting known vulnerabilities.

Penetration Testing Mitigation Output

Penetration testing, by comparison, typically produces a report that documents:

• Identified vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
• Exploitation evidence and potential impact
• High-level remediation guidance, such as patching or hardening

While these findings are valuable, penetration testing outputs generally do not include deployable, control-specific mitigation artifacts. The responsibility for translating findings into firewall rules, IPS signatures, SIEM detections, or EDR logic is left to security and operations teams, often requiring additional engineering effort.

Where BAS and Manual Penetration Testing Fit in the CTEM Framework

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is not a tool and not a testing method. It is the governing framework.

The actual operating mechanism beneath CTEM is Exposure Management, the set of processes and technologies used to continuously identify, prioritize, validate, and reduce exposure across the attack surface.

This distinction matters, because CTEM is often misunderstood as just another assessment approach. In reality, it is designed to do something very specific:

That single design goal determines where every activity fits, how validation must be performed, and which capabilities can truly support the CTEM framework versus those that only provide point-in-time insight.

Why CTEM Needs Continuous Validation

Because CTEM is outcome-driven, it requires ongoing, repeatable evidence that:

• an exposure is exploitable, or
• an exposure is effectively mitigated by controls

And that evidence must remain valid over time, even as:

• environments change
• configurations drift
• controls are updated
• new threats and techniques emerge

If validation cannot be repeated safely and frequently, it cannot sustain CTEM. At that point, the program collapses back into periodic assessment. This is the lens through which Gartner evaluates BAS, AEV, and manual penetration testing.

Where BAS Fits (via Adversarial Exposure Validation)

Within this model, BAS fits because it operationalizes Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV).

AEV is the validation pillar of Exposure Management under CTEM. BAS is one of the primary execution mechanisms AEV uses to deliver continuous, control-aware proof.

Through BAS-style simulation, AEV can repeatedly validate whether real-world attack techniques succeed or fail in the presence of deployed security controls, in production, without disruption. This allows exposure validation to function as a living feedback loop, not a one-time verdict.

That is why Gartner no longer treats BAS as a standalone category. It is structurally embedded inside AEV to serve CTEM’s core requirement: continuous, evidence-based validation that scales.

In short:

• CTEM defines the goal
• Exposure Management is the operating model
• AEV is the validation mechanism
• BAS is how AEV scales continuously

Where Manual Penetration Testing Diverges

Manual penetration testing diverges not because it lacks value, but because it is not designed for continuity.

Manual pentesting produces high-fidelity, human-led proof of exploitability and impact within a fixed scope and time window. That makes it excellent for depth, creativity, and complex attack chains.

But its outputs are:

• point-in-time
• scope-bound
• difficult to repeat frequently
• expensive to operationalize continuously

As environments evolve, the evidence produced by a pentest ages quickly. It does not continuously confirm whether controls still work or whether mitigations remain effective.

From a CTEM standpoint, this means manual pentesting cannot serve as the primary validation engine. It functions instead as a supplemental input to Exposure Management, valuable, but not structurally capable of sustaining CTEM on its own.

Final Verdict 

• CTEM is the framework that governs modern security programs; Exposure Management is the engine that runs it; Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) is the proof layer that makes it real.

• BAS operationalizes AEV to deliver continuous, scalable validation, while manual penetration testing remains a valuable but episodic input that cannot sustain continuous exposure reduction on its own.

The takeaway for security leaders is straightforward: if your objective is to continuously reduce real exposure, your validation approach must be continuous, repeatable, and control-aware. Periodic testing alone, no matter how skilled, cannot meet that mandate. CTEM succeeds only when validation evolves from point-in-time assessments to ongoing evidence that defenses work as environments and threats change.

If your program is still driven by snapshots, it’s time to move to continuous validation.

👉 Ready to operationalize CTEM? See how continuous Adversarial Exposure Validation turns exposure into measurable risk reduction.