The Future of Security Testing: A 2025 Guide to Adversarial Exposure Validation

Most security leaders today can agree that attackers are moving faster, using more automation, and taking advantage of gaps that are easy to miss in complex environments. In the AI-fueled threat landscape of 2025, finding vulnerabilities holds little value for security teams without validating which ones actually matter and how an attacker would use them to access business-critical assets and information.

That’s where many traditional offensive security programs, tools, and solutions start to fall short. You can have strong tools, regular scans, and solid processes, yet still be unsure about your real level of exposure. Security leaders need clarity on what an attacker could do, the extent of damage that could result from a potential breach, and important fixes that actually reduce risks that are not just theoretical but proven.

To gain these insights, security teams need to mimic their adversaries’ behavior and essentially hack themselves to test their defenses’ resilience against likely attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This has historically been challenging to scale, but Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) has changed that.

In this blog, we’ll explore what AEV is, why it’s important to your cybersecurity program, how it works, how to measure its efficacy, and more.

What is Adversarial Exposure Validation?

Gartner defines adversarial exposure validation (AEV) as “technologies that deliver consistent, continuous and automated evidence of the feasibility of an attack.”¹ In essence, AEV identifies and validates viable attack paths and confirms how an adversary would successfully exploit an organization and bypass its existing security controls. Using AEV, organizations gain an understanding of not only where their systems are exposed and vulnerable, but also how critical each finding is based on real-world ease of exploitability and potential impact.

Why Your Cybersecurity Program Needs Adversarial Exposure Validation

Gartner predicts that “Through 2027, 40% of organizations will have adopted formal exposure validation initiatives, most relying on AEV technologies and managed service providers for maturity and consistency.”¹

Traditional red teaming and penetration testing are valuable, but they can’t match the speed, scale, or persistence of modern adversaries, especially those using automation and AI, which is more common than not in today’s threat landscape. These legacy solutions depend largely on human effort and expertise, limiting even well-run programs with point-in-time snapshots that quickly become outdated, leaving teams unsure about their current level of exposure.

AEV changes this by autonomously emulating attacker behavior to make continuous validation possible at a scale that was not previously feasible. It doesn’t aim to replace security teams, but to free them from manual, repeatable tasks so they can focus on remediating critical risks and strengthening the organization’s security posture faster, and with broader coverage.

Additionally, over the past five or so years, organizations have increasingly begun adopting and implementing Gartner’s Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework, which, as its name suggests, outlines a clear process for continuously identifying, prioritizing, and managing exposures that most impact the organization. Unlike traditional vulnerability management programs, the goal of a CTEM program isn’t to fix every vulnerability but to fix the ones most likely to be exploited and impact the business the most.

AEV aligns naturally with enterprise CTEM programs by delivering the continuous, real-world validation that security teams need to focus their energy and resources on high-value actions that move the needle in reducing organizational security risk. By automating activities traditionally performed by human red teamers, AEV ensures organizations can validate exposures at scale, keep pace with attacker innovation, and maintain a real-time understanding of their security posture.

In summary, AEV provides a proactive, continuous, and scalable way to test your security defenses, allowing you to:

• Understand your exposure to real attacks.
• Assess attack feasibility, probability, and potential impact.
• Test, validate, and refine security defenses.
• Address gaps before they can be exploited by attackers.
• Continuously mitigate emerging exploitable vulnerabilities.

How Adversarial Exposure Validation Works

We’ve already addressed that AEV provides valuable insights into what an attacker could actually do in your environment, but here’s how it works:  
Modern AEV solutions use generative AI to automate complex, multistep attack scenarios based on current adversary TTPs and threat intelligence to validate how exposures can be chained and exploited. Instead of testing a single vulnerability, they execute full attack paths across vectors like phishing, misconfigurations, zero-days, identity abuse, and lateral movement, and in doing so, show security teams and business leaders alike where defenses hold against threats and where they fail.

To create these complex attack scenarios, AI-driven reconnaissance continuously maps your external attack surface and uncovers relationships between assets. Advanced AEV platforms use generative AI to gather real-time intelligence and automatically assemble enterprise-wide attack chains, which is work that traditionally requires specialized red teamers and days or even weeks of manual effort.

The most advanced tools also simplify operations with visual scenario builders, configurable guardrails, and AI-generated reports that translate raw attack data into clear narratives, attack-path visualizations, and prioritized remediation guidance.

The result is a continuously updated, attacker-informed view of your true security posture so security teams can focus on eliminating root causes and reducing risk faster.

Agentless vs Agent-Based Solutions

AEV platforms can be either agentless or agent-based. Agent-based AEV solutions require users to install software on target systems to analyze them and execute attack scenarios. While agent-based solutions offer granular visibility, they often slow deployment, create unnecessary overhead, and restrict the testing scope.

Agentless AEV platforms remove these operational barriers and interact with target assets without deploying software on endpoints or servers. This is done through authenticated access, safe configuration checks, and controlled scenario execution. Agentless solutions allow organizations to start testing much faster and broaden their testing scope across hybrid infrastructures with fewer restrictions.

Both agentless and agent-based models deliver similar results, but agentless approaches tend to align better with enterprise requirements for speed and coverage and are generally known for being easier to implement and less disruptive.

Measuring the Success of Your AEV Solution

Security leaders can measure the success of newly implemented AEV solutions by focusing on measurable improvements in cybersecurity resilience and operational efficiency. Key performance metrics that security leaders should focus on to measure success include:

• Reduction in exploitable attack paths: Track how many validated attack chains are eliminated over time.
• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) validated exposures: Track how security operations are improving in response to confirmed weaknesses.
• Control effectiveness across MITRE ATT&CK techniques: Track which controls consistently pass or fail during simulations.
• High-impact findings per scenario: Track whether your environment is becoming easier or more challenging for adversaries to compromise.
• Attack surface coverage: Ensure security validation is expanding simultaneously with the attack surface.

These metrics give leaders a grounded way to report progress and assess program maturity.

Where AEV Fits Alongside PTaaS, ASM, BAS, and Red Teaming

AEV fills a gap that traditional security testing models and tools aren’t designed to solve alone.

Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) solutions focus on simulating threats to validate security controls, Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) improves the efficiency and scalability of human-led pentesting, Attack Surface Management (ASM) maps externally visible assets and identifies exposures, and red teaming evaluates resilience through targeted, manual attack campaigns. Each provides its own value, but they operate within narrow scopes.

AEV brings components of these individual tools and solutions together by mapping and validating how exposures interact across identities, systems, and assets, and how they could be exploited and chained together in a real-world attack. While red teaming also accomplishes this, it is heavily dependent on manual human effort, making it impossible to scale to modern enterprise needs, and is not continuous like AEV is.

This makes AEV a natural complement to existing programs and a critical control layer for CTEM maturity.

Close Critical Security Gaps Faster with BreachLock AEV

BreachLock AEV is the first agentless, Gen AI–powered platform designed to simulate adversaries across your entire attack surface.

As a SaaS-native solution, BreachLock Adversarial Exposure Validation takes only minutes to deploy on any standard operating system with no agents, hardware, or complex setup required, making it easy for busy security teams to start testing immediately. It provides unified coverage across hybrid and cloud-native environments, including internal networks and external assets like web applications and APIs.

Security teams can launch unlimited attack scenarios in seconds, with full control over targets, intensity, TTPs, and lateral movement to ensure testing never unexpectedly disrupts business operations. BreachLock AEV leverages MITRE ATT&CK™ mapping to ensure simulations reflect real-world adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures, giving teams actionable, context-rich insights for prioritization and remediation.

Features like visual asset scoping, instant start/stop with kill-switch functionality, and agentless architecture give teams complete flexibility without relying on deployment windows or support teams. BreachLock provides real-time visibility of attack scenarios as they unfold in users’ systems, gathering evidence of defenses passing or failing across the attack chain.

With unlimited testing under a single license, BreachLock AEV scales seamlessly with your environment without the worries of per-test, per-asset, or hidden costs.

Accelerate your CTEM strategy and gain a real-time, attacker-informed view of your security posture. Book a discovery call today to see BreachLock AEV in action!

References:

1. Ahlm, E., Poole, D., et al. (2025, March 11). Market Guide for Adversarial Exposure Validation. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/6255151

Author

BreachLock Labs