Cyber Resilience Assessment: Identifying Detection Gaps and Strengthening Security 

Organizations invest heavily in security tooling to improve their defensive posture.  

These tools require constant attention, care, and optimization to ensure they’re functioning properly.  Yet, without a real-world incident, it isn’t easy to validate their effectiveness.  

That’s where the Varonis Cyber Resilience Assessment (CRA) comes in — the fastest way to confirm your tools are doing what they’re supposed to.

The Cyber Resilience Assessment

The Varonis CRA evaluates your organization’s ability to detect and respond to cyber threats by leveraging real-world attack scenarios tailored to each organization’s industry and associated threat actors.  

Unlike traditional security audits, which focus on policy compliance and theoretical risks, our CRA uses ‘active tests’ against an organization’s detection capabilities with real-world tools and techniques that are commonly deployed in actual attacks. 

In addition to this, our teams build and maintain a library of custom attacks to help simulate the most advanced threats — the attacks making headlines.  We will even work with your team if you want to test a specific type of attack flow in your network to develop and customize our simulation to fit your needs. 

Key objectives of the CRA 

Assessing the effectiveness of existing security tools 

The CRA simulates real-world adversarial behavior by employing tools such as Cobalt Strike, the Impacket suite, and other custom scripting to evaluate how an organization’s EDR, SIEM, and logging infrastructure can detect and respond to known attack methods. 

Using the same tools and TTPs as modern threat actors, the assessment provides insight into whether security solutions are correctly configured and capable of generating actionable alerts. 

Understanding your organization’s response readiness 

Organizations often deploy security tools but may not have fully optimized detection and response workflows to react in real-time. 

The CRA identifies whether these security solutions can provide alerts based on the attacker activity observed during testing. 

Gaps in detection are highlighted during a review process that examines the existing security stack, looking for key actions threat actors would take. 

Evaluating detection and response to cyber threats 

One of the CRA’s most critical aspects is measuring how well an organization’s existing security stack can identify command and control, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and data exfiltration techniques. 

In addition, the CRA evaluates whether the initial execution of ransomware would be successful or thwarted by existing controls. 

The assessment examines how well current tools and processes detect and disrupt real-world attack patterns. Hidden risks that organizations often overlook include: 

1. Insufficient logging visibility, where critical attack chains go undetected due to missing telemetry 
2. Poor correlation of attack sequences, where security teams receive fragmented alerts that fail to tell a complete story 
3. Ineffective anomaly detection, where behavioral-based detections fail to recognize command-and-control beaconing or lateral movement 
4. Over-reliance on a single security layer, where bypassing of a single control, such as EDR or application whitelisting, causes a significant reduction in security posture 
5. Challenges introduced by public cloud resources, where attackers leverage legitimate services to blend in and evade traditional detection mechanisms

Addressing threats with a realistic approach 

To ensure accuracy, the CRA uses an assumed breach model. We begin with a standard domain user account to simulate initial access and apply the latest adversary tactics and techniques, including: 

• Using Cobalt Strike and other custom tooling to test endpoint defenses and command and control detection 
• Deploying offensive tools to simulate lateral movement within the environment 
• Examining how existing security configurations interact with cloud and proxy infrastructure ensures that modern attacker methodologies cannot easily mask threats 

By identifying detection gaps and response limitations, the CRA helps your team improve its ability to detect, analyze, and contain real threats — before they cause real damage.  

Varonis' CRA is a complimentary service provided for our customers and organizations that are currently going through an evaluation of our products. 

To get a CRA started, please reach out to your Varonis account manager.