Why AEV Is Foundational to Enterprise Security Validation and Continuous Threat Exposure Management

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), 72% of organizations admit that their cyber risks have increased over the past 12 months.¹ And following a number of high-profile breaches and sophisticated cyberattacks in 2025, it’s not surprising that many enterprise leaders are concerned about cybersecurity. In fact, 76% of CISOs believe that their company is at risk of a material cyberattack within the next 12 months. Another 58% even admit that their firms are unprepared for an attack.²

All these findings demonstrate how the expansion and growing complexity of the cyberthreat landscape are creating gaps in organizations’ cybersecurity abilities and controls. So how can they close these gaps and strengthen their security ecosystems?

The answer: Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), a modern approach to enterprise security validation that continuously tests whether security controls actually hold up against real-world attacks.

How Security Gaps Emerge in Organizations

It’s easy to assume that security gaps emerge because of a lack of proper tools or missing controls, but in many cases, gaps appear when enterprise security validation fails to keep pace with changes pushed into production. As enterprises continue to expand into the cloud, integrate new technologies, and continuously ship changes, security controls often fail silently when left unchecked.

Controls that worked as intended at one point can degrade over time, largely due to configuration drift, policy sprawl, failed integrations, or even burnout and operational overload. The problem here is that attackers today adapt quickly to form attack paths that static, point-in-time assessments cannot bring to the surface quickly enough.

In the context of enterprise security validation, point-in-time penetration testing assessments and one-off vulnerability scans can create a false sense of security since the results are only accurate at the time of the test itself in dynamic environments. Controls may be deployed, dashboards may appear healthy, and vulnerabilities may appear to be patched, but traditional security tests don’t offer the real-time, continuous visibility security teams need to truly know where their risks lie.

In turn, security gaps not only exist, but continue to exist under the radar.

How Adversarial Exposure Validation Strengthens Enterprise Security Validation

Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) is a scalable and effective way to operationalize enterprise security validation by continuously testing both risk exposure and the effectiveness of security controls against real attacker behavior.

At a basic level, AEV autonomously executes the activities traditionally performed by skilled, human red teamers. It emulates real attackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and automatically executes complex, multi-step attack scenarios across multiple threat vectors to simulate how actual adversaries attack and move to reach critical business assets.

With these scenarios, AEV doesn’t just answer the question: Did XYZ control block this particular attack technique?

Rather, it answers three key questions:

• Could a real attacker successfully achieve their objective: unauthorized access to an asset, data exfiltration, persistence, lateral movement, and so on?
• What is the exploitable path that could help them achieve this objective?
• What is the operational or business impact of the potential exploitation?

In essence, security teams can leverage AEV to uncover which security controls are working, and more importantly, which ones are not, so they can be fixed. Furthermore, AEV highlights real, validated risks that could lead to a breach rather than just identifying theoretical risks and vulnerabilities.

Unlike theoretical severity scores that often fail to measure the actual, real-world effectiveness of security controls, and worse, create a false sense of security, AEV captures and clarifies the nuances of real-world, fast-evolving security environments. These insights provided by AEV empower security teams to make timely, threat-informed decisions, move quickly from threat detection to threat resolution, and effectively manage the expanding attack surface.

Why AEV is Foundational to Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

Continuous Threat Exposure Management, or CTEM, a concept first introduced by Gartner, is a structured and proactive way to identify, assess, and mitigate the cybersecurity risks that most affect a business.3 This approach consists of five steps:

• Scoping for the organization’s vulnerable entry points and assets, i.e., its attack surface
• Discovery of assets and their risk profiles
• Prioritization of the threats that are most likely to be exploited by real attackers.
• Validation of how attacks might work and if the current response plan is adequate to protect the business
• Mobilization of resources (people and processes) to operationalize CTEM findings

CTEM aims to reduce an organization’s threat exposure by continuously identifying vulnerabilities and attack paths, prioritizing risks based on their business impact, and validating controls through continuous enterprise security validation rather than periodic, point-in-time testing.

AEV plays a foundational role in Phase 4 of CTEM, Validation, making it a critical component of any mature CTEM program. CTEM-aligned AEV solutions show how a vulnerability could actually be exploited by a real adversary, which attack paths they would take, and what the resulting business impact would be.

By continuously validating exposures against real-world attacker behavior within an organization’s live attack surface, AEV provides security teams with the evidence they need to progress from remediating assumed risks to proven risks. With clear, actionable insights from mapped attack paths, prioritized exposures, and business-relevant context, security teams can maintain laser focus on remediating risks that matter most.

Just as importantly, AEV tells a story that business leaders can understand, translating technical findings into proven business impact, enabling faster, more confident decisions and resource allocation to close the security gaps that pose the greatest risk.

Close Your Security Gaps and Boost Security Resilience with BreachLock AEV

BreachLock AEV supports continuous enterprise security validation by emulating real-world adversaries across an organization’s live attack surface and proving which exposures are actually exploitable.

As an agentless, GenAI-powered solution, BreachLock AEV is built to help organizations scale internal red team efforts without added operational overhead by autonomously emulating real adversaries across the full enterprise attack surface.

BreachLock AEV can be deployed in minutes on any standard operating system with no agents, hardware, or complex setup required, allowing security teams to begin adversarial testing immediately. Security teams can launch complex attack scenarios in seconds, with granular control over targets, attack intensity, permitted TTPs, and lateral movement allowances to ensure testing doesn’t disrupt business operations. All findings are mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK™ framework, ensuring scenarios reflect real-world adversary behavior and deliver actionable insights that support effective, risk-based prioritization and remediation grounded in validated risk.

Capabilities like visual asset scoping, instant kill-switch functionality, and a fully agentless architecture give teams flexibility without dependencies on deployment windows or additional support resources. BreachLock also provides real-time visibility into attack scenarios as they unfold, capturing evidence of where defenses succeed and fail across the attack chain.

With unlimited testing included under a single license, BreachLock AEV scales with your environment without per-test or per-asset constraints. The result is a continuous, attacker-informed view of your security posture that supports faster decisions and more confident risk reduction.

To accelerate your CTEM strategy and see BreachLock AEV in action, schedule a discovery call or demo today.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in offensive security, delivering scalable and continuous security testing. Trusted by global enterprises, BreachLock provides human-led and AI-powered Attack Surface Management, Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), Red Teaming, and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) solutions that help security teams stay ahead of adversaries.

With a mission to make proactive security the new standard, BreachLock is shaping the future of cybersecurity through automation, data-driven intelligence, and expert-driven execution.

Know Your Risk. Contact BreachLock today!

References

1. World Economic Forum (2025). Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Cybersecurity_Outlook_2025.pdf

2. Proofpoint (2025). 2025 Voice of the CISO. https://www.proofpoint.com/sites/default/files/white-papers/pfpt-us-wp-voice-of-the-CISO-report.pdf

3. Gartner (2023). How to Manage Cybersecurity Threats, Not Episodes. https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/how-to-manage-cybersecurity-threats-not-episodes

Author

BreachLock Labs