Everything You Need To Know About BAS Tools

What Are Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) Tools?

Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) tools are security validation technologies that emulate and simulate real adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed in the wild to verify whether an organization’s security controls can prevent, detect, or respond to real attacks. BAS tools have traditionally been used to validate individual security controls against known attack techniques through predefined scenarios, providing assurance around control coverage and configuration effectiveness.

As exposure management practices have matured and been formalized under frameworks such as CTEM, BAS tools are now applied within a broader context to support exposure and risk validation, contributing evidence on attack feasibility and control effectiveness as part of enterprise-wide exposure reduction efforts.

Gartner Positioning: From BAS to Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV)

In its Market Guide for Adversarial Exposure Validation (11 March 2025), Gartner positions Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) software within the broader Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) category, reflecting its role as a core validation capability for proving exploitability and exposure risk.

At a high level:

• BAS = Adversary emulation & simulation used to validate the effectiveness of security controls against real-world threats such as malware, threat actors, CVE exploitation, or other scenarios.
• Automated Penetration Testing = Exploits internal vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across the network, chaining them to validate attacker-feasible paths to crown-jewel assets and assess business impact.
• AEV = Evidence-based validation of whether exposures are actually exploitable in an organization’s unique environment. (validation step)

Simplified:

• AEV = BAS + Automated Penetration Testing, and Red Teaming
• AEV refers to the set of technologies that serve as the "validation" backbone of the CTEM framework.
  

Together, these solutions exploit vulnerabilities prioritized by CVSS, EPSS, and asset criticality to confirm real-world exploitability and business impact.

Key Shift in Purpose of BAS 2.0

The rebranding of BAS tools under the umbrella term Adversarial Exposure Validation has led some vendors and communities to refer to BAS as “BAS 2.0.” 

Figure 1: CTEM Process by Gartner

While the underlying technology and its operation remain the same, the rebranding reflects a strategic repositioning of BAS within the CTEM framework, aligning it more explicitly with the validation phase and its role in validating exposure and risk.

• Traditional BAS positioning: “Does this individual security control block, or, if not, detect, this known attack technique?”
• AEV-aligned BAS positioning within the CTEM framework: “Can an attacker realistically succeed in our environment, and which validated exposure must we act on first to reduce business risk?”
  

Top 6 Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) Tools Reviewed by Gartner

Gartner Peer Insights showcases reviews of the top Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) tools based on user feedback, highlighting their capabilities in enhancing cybersecurity defenses. The leading solutions are as follows:

• Picus Security
• Cymulate
• AttackIQ
• SafeBreach
• XM Cyber
• Pentera

These platforms enable organizations to simulate attack scenarios, assess the effectiveness of their security controls, and identify gaps in their defenses. 

If you’d like a detailed competitive analysis of these six vendors and their strengths, click here.

Which Security Controls Can Be Tested by BAS Software?

A BAS tool is designed to validate the effectiveness of security controls already deployed in an organization, not to introduce additional tooling.

Enterprise environments typically operate 40–80 distinct security technologies, and in complex or highly regulated organizations, this number often exceeds 100. As these controls evolve over time due to configuration changes, policy updates, and operational drift, their real-world effectiveness cannot be assumed.

To deliver meaningful return on investment, a BAS platform must:

• Integrate broadly across existing security controls
• Validate controls continuously, not as a one-time exercise
• Detect control drift caused by misconfiguration or environmental change

Without deep and wide integrations, security control validation is structurally incomplete by design.

How Do BAS Tools Work?

BAS tools validate security controls by emulating realistic adversary behavior across the full attack kill chain within an organization’s own environment. These activities are executed in a safe, controlled, and non-destructive manner, ensuring no operational impact.

BAS platforms run predefined and continuously updated attack scenarios that reflect real-world tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). These scenarios typically include:

Attack Scenarios Tested

• Network infiltration attacks (malware download)
• Endpoint attacks (Windows, Linux, macOS, Kubernetes)
• Web application exploitation (both agent-based, and agentless)
• Email infiltration attacks 
• Data exfiltration attacks
• URL filtering bypass attempts

Attack Vectors Emulated

To execute these scenarios, BAS tools employ multiple adversary techniques, including but not limited to:

• Malware and ransomware delivery simulations
• Atomic attack techniques (for example, credential dumping)
• Exploitation of known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
• Threat group and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) emulation

How BAS Validated

By executing these techniques under different attack paths and conditions, BAS tools assess whether existing security controls:

• Block or prevent attack progression
• Detect malicious activity
• Generate accurate and timely alerts
• Provide actionable response and remediation signals

This continuous, automated validation enables organizations to identify control gaps, detect configuration drift, and verify defensive effectiveness before real attackers exploit those weaknesses.

Can a BAS Tool Protect You from Zero-day Vulnerabilities?

TL;DR: BAS tools don’t stop zero-day vulnerabilities themselves, but they let organizations quickly and safely verify whether existing security controls can detect or block zero-day exploit attempts as soon as a reliable attack method becomes available.

Breach and Attack Simulation tools do not prevent zero-day vulnerabilities on their own. Instead, their value lies in rapidly validating whether existing security controls can detect or block exploitation attempts once a reliable attack method becomes known.

High-ROI BAS platforms, such as those focused on security control validation, prioritize speed of coverage. 

For example, leading BAS products (like Picus SCV) commit to 24-hour SLAs for critical threats, including newly disclosed vulnerabilities and CISA KEV alerts, ensuring attack techniques are added to the attack library as quickly as possible.

How BAS Vendors Handle Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

BAS can validate exposure to zero-day vulnerabilities when a reliable, publicly available proof of concept (PoC) exists. In such cases, vendors follow a strict, safe methodology:

• Red team researchers analyze the PoC to understand exploit mechanics and prerequisites.
• A safe, controlled, non-destructive exploitation scenario is created to mirror real-world attacker behavior.
• The scenario is rigorously tested to ensure safe execution in production environments.
• The validated attack is added to the BAS library, while blue team researchers provide ready-to-apply vendor mitigations.

This enables organizations to immediately test whether their defenses detect, block, or mitigate an exploitation attack, without waiting for patches or signatures, and to prioritize remediation based on validated exposure.

Can You Run Breach and Attack Simulation in Production? 

TL:DR; Yes. Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) is designed to run safely in production environments.

Modern BAS solutions are built specifically to validate security controls in live systems without causing disruption, downtime, or data loss. Rather than exploiting systems destructively, BAS simulates adversary behaviors in a controlled, non-intrusive manner, allowing organizations to test their real-world readiness under actual operating conditions.

Production environments are complex and dynamic. Security controls that appear effective in labs or staging environments may fail in production due to configuration drift, logging gaps, traffic volume, or integration issues. BAS addresses this problem by safely validating whether controls such as EDRs, SIEMs, firewalls, and cloud security tools detect, block, or alert on attack techniques exactly as they would in real incidents.

BAS tools achieves this by:

• Simulating attack techniques (e.g., initial access, discovery, lateral movement, persistence, credential abuse) without executing harmful payloads
  • For example, impact techniques are tested by creating and encrypting a dummy file, rather than encrypting a real, sensitive document.
• Avoiding system state changes, data modification, or service disruption
• Running continuously and at scale with minimal operational overhead
• Focusing on detection and prevention validation, not exploitation

Because BAS does not encrypt files, escalate real privileges, or alter production systems, it can be executed frequently, even in highly regulated or 24/7 environments, to provide ongoing assurance that defenses are working as intended.

Key Criteria When Selecting a Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) Tool

• Comprehensive Attack Vector Coverage: Ability to simulate a wide range of real-world attack vectors across network, endpoint, application, and data layers, including malware delivery, lateral movement, data exfiltration, vulnerability exploitation, web and email attacks.
• Realistic Adversary Behavior Simulation: Support for simulating attacker TTPs used by real threat groups and malware campaigns, rather than relying solely on static or synthetic test cases.
• Up-to-Date Threat Library: Rapid and continuous updates reflecting known and emerging threats, including sector- or region-specific adversary activity, with minimal delay between public advisories and test availability.
• Validation of Preventive and Detective Controls: Native ability to test the effectiveness of security controls such as NGFW, IPS/IDS, WAF, EDR/XDR, SIEM, DLP, email and web gateways, covering both prevention and detection outcomes.
• Continuous and Automated Testing: Support for fully automated, recurring simulations to detect security gaps caused by configuration drift, new vulnerabilities, or infrastructure changes between periodic assessments.
• Custom Threat and Scenario Creation: Flexibility to design and execute custom attack scenarios tailored to organizational context, including different operating systems, environments, and attack domains.
• Actionable, Validated Mitigation Guidance: Delivery of vendor-specific and vendor-neutral mitigation recommendations that are pre-tested and validated to work as intended, enabling faster and more reliable remediation.
• Clear, Role-Based Reporting: Reporting capabilities tailored for different stakeholders, including executives, SOC teams, and auditors, with metrics such as prevention and detection rates, MTTD, trends, and compliance alignment.
• Framework Alignment (e.g., MITRE ATT&CK): Automatic mapping of simulated attacks and results to industry frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, enabling visibility into kill-chain coverage and defensive gaps.
• Ease of Deployment and Use: Simple deployment (cloud, on-premises, or hybrid), intuitive user experience, minimal operational overhead, and seamless integration with existing security infrastructure.
  

Limitations of Open Source BAS Tools

MITRE Caldera

MITRE Caldera offers a sophisticated emulation of cyber threats, giving users the capability to autonomously emulate red team engagements and customize adversary scenarios. What sets Caldera apart is its comprehensive coverage of ATT&CK techniques, making it a preferred choice for organizations leaning heavily on the MITRE framework.

• Complexity: Caldera is intricate, requiring operators with a deeper understanding to effectively utilize its capabilities.
• Post-Compromise Emphasis: While it's comprehensive, Caldera's primary focus remains on post-compromise techniques, potentially leaving some pre-compromise vectors less explored.

Atomic Red Team

Atomic Red Team is designed for granularity, allowing security teams to focus on specific ATT&CK techniques and test them individually or in chained sequences. It's a favorite in the community, owing to its comprehensive atomic test library.

• Automation Lacking: Its default setup does not automatically run tests, which means manually triggering each test, potentially reducing efficiency.
• Limited Scenario Emulation: Individual tests may not capture the complexity of real-world attack chains unless manually strung together by operators.

Infection Monkey

Guardicore's Infection Monkey is renowned for its aggressive breach simulations, focusing on lateral movement across networks. It operates more like a rampant monkey than a stealthy adversary, which is both its strength and its limitation.

• Noise Generation: Infection Monkey is aggressive and can create significant noise during simulations, which isn't representative of sophisticated, stealthy adversaries.
• Unpredictable Emulations: Its modus operandi, while thorough, may not align with specific scenarios organizations want to test, given its rampant approach.

Stratus Red Team

Stratus Red Team fills a niche in the open-source space, offering emulation tools explicitly tailored for cloud environments. Its unique focus on cloud-based threats makes it a go-to for businesses heavily invested in cloud infrastructure.

• Limited Scope: Being cloud-specific, it doesn't address threats in non-cloud environments, potentially leaving gaps in holistic security assessments.
• Narrow Emulation Range: It doesn't cover the full spectrum of threats, focusing primarily on cloud-based attacks.

Honorable Mentions

DumpsterFire:

• Outdated Scenarios: Many of its test scenarios were created years ago and might not fully represent the current threat landscape, potentially missing new and emerging threats.

Metta:

• Limited Updates: With no significant updates since 2018, its library lacks newer adversary techniques, making it less relevant for today's threat landscape.

Red Team Automation (RTA):

• Maintenance Concerns: It hasn't been updated or maintained since 2018, raising concerns about its relevance and effectiveness against modern threats.

Picus Security Control Validation Powered by BAS

Picus Security Control Validation (SCV), powered by Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), continuously validates whether your security controls actually prevent, detect, and alert on real-world attacks.

Within the CTEM framework, Picus SCV supports the validation phase by safely simulating and emulating emerging and known attacker techniques in production and proving which previously prioritized exposures are truly exploitable versus already mitigated by existing controls. 

This replaces assumption-based decision-making with evidence, enabling organizations to focus remediation on confirmed control gaps and deprioritize exposures that attackers cannot successfully use.

Why Should You Choose Picus for the Best BAS Tool in the Market?

Picus’s platform combines BAS, Automated Penetration Testing, and Attack Path Validation as part of its Adversarial Exposure Validation capabilities.

Figure. 2025 Gartner Peer Insights™ "Voice of the Customer for Adversarial Exposure Validation, October 30, 2025.

We are excited to announce that Picus Security has been recognized as a Customers’ Choice in the 2025 Gartner Peer Insights™ "Voice of the Customer for Adversarial Exposure Validation" report, released on October 30, 2025. 

• Picus joins Cymulate and Horizon 3.ai in the Customers' Choice quadrant. 
• Vendors in this quadrant are listed alphabetically, and no ranking is implied.
• Vendors placed in the upper-right “Customers’ Choice” quadrant have met or exceeded the market average for both User Interest and Adoption and Overall Experience.

At Picus, our success is defined by the results we deliver for our customers every day. According to the Gartner report, based on 71 reviews as of 31 August 2025, Picus Security was recognized  by our peers:

• 98% Willingness to Recommend: The highest percentage among all vendors listed in the report. 
• 4.8 out of 5 Overall Rating: The highest overall rating (tied) ) listed in the report.
• Customer Satisfaction: 80% of reviewers gave Picus Security the 5-star rating.

👉 Validate which exposures actually work against your defenses. See Security Control Validation in action.