What is Attack Path Analysis?

Attack path analysis (APA) identifies potential routes attackers could exploit to infiltrate your network or system. 

Using attack path mapping, you can better understand how vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and permissions associated with assets and identities on your network combine to create exploitable scenarios.

This cybersecurity approach often uses attack graphs to illustrate connections between compromised resources and their potential impact on critical assets. In its simplest form, APA will help you:

• Understand the relationship between assets, identities and risks attackers can exploit to compromise crown jewel assets.
• Identify specific risks, techniques or choke points within an attack path that attackers can use to break the attack chain and disrupt one or more attack paths. 
• Recommend which specific patches, configuration changes or actions you can use to mitigate risk.

To outsmart attackers, you must think like them. APA is important because it helps you see the sequence of steps an attacker could take to compromise systems. It highlights where threat actors could gain access within your attack surface, move laterally, escalate privileges and achieve an intended outcome like disrupting services, exfiltrating sensitive data or holding a network or data for ransom. 

With APA insight, your security teams can take proactive action to act decisively and strengthen your cybersecurity defenses.

• An attack surface includes all the ways an attacker could exploit your digital assets, from external systems to identities and vulnerabilities. It varies depending on your organization’s size, industry and tech stack.
• Attack vectors are techniques attackers could use to exploit a vulnerability, misconfiguration or excess permissions from your attack surface like unpatched software vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, malware, compromised identities, etc.
• Attack paths are asset, identity and risk relationships an attacker can exploit in a sequence to gain entry, move laterally and achieve an intended outcome.

Attack path analysis aligns closely with the MITRE ATT&CK framework, which categorizes adversary tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). APA complements this framework by:

• Identifying TTPs the MITRE ATT&CK framework outlines that attackers can exploit within your environment.
• Identifying TTP combinations an attacker can exploit.
• Informing mitigation strategies for high-priority techniques.

By integrating APA with the MITRE ATT&CK Framework, you can bridge the gap between theoretical threat modeling and actionable security measures.

1. Use attack paths to visually demonstrate potential impact and validate and prioritize patch management or other mitigation needs.
2. Quickly trace and mitigate active breaches with a detailed view of weaknesses leading to critical assets.
3. Identify rogue assets and connections that can compromise the integrity of air-gapped environments. 
4. Identify risky configurations, privileges and vulnerabilities that can lead to compromise of mission-critical applications, systems and identities. 
5. Communicate risk in a language executives and board members can understand rather than by volume of individual risks.
6. Prevent attackers from accessing critical systems and data to ensure business continuity.
7. Identify and address attack paths that could lead to regulatory violations to ensure compliance with standards such as SOC 2 and GDPR.

• Automatically identify all assets and identities within your network, including unmanaged or shadow IT resources.
• Regularly update and assess your attack surface to detect new vulnerabilities or changes in the network.
• Provide clear mappings of potential attack routes (attack path visualization) to show how attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in sequence.
• Evaluate vulnerability severity and potential impact to prioritize remediation based on risk and asset criticality.
• Seamlessly work with existing security tools and frameworks for a unified defense strategy.
• Get clear and intuitive visual representations of attack paths and choke points (attack graph visualization).
• Automatically identify and map all assets, including shadow IT and cloud resources.
• Continuously track changes in your environment to identify new risks and attack paths in real time.
• Get actionable insights and step-by-step remediation guidance to address risks.
• Get clear, real-time attack path mapping with details on source, target and severity.
• Highlight areas where multiple attack paths intersect for focused mitigation.
• Get support for dynamic cloud and hybrid environments.
• Notify teams of critical risks and recommended remediation steps.

• Credential and privilege escalation attack paths focus on how attackers can escalate privileges using stolen credentials, weak authentication mechanisms or misconfigured permissions. Techniques such as Pass-the-Hash, Kerberoasting and overprivileged accounts allow adversaries to gain higher access levels, often leading to domain-wide compromise.
• Lateral movement attack paths enable attackers to navigate through a network after initial access. Exploiting misconfigured delegation, SMB relay attacks and weak group policies, attackers move from low-privileged accounts or machines to more critical assets, such as domain controllers or sensitive databases.
• Vulnerability exploitation paths rely on attackers exploiting unpatched software vulnerabilities or system weaknesses to gain unauthorized access. Attackers target critical CVEs, ransomware entry points and misconfigured hybrid Active Directory (AD) environments to execute code, escalate privileges or move laterally within a network.
• Poor network security and misconfigurations create network and misconfiguration-based attack paths that can allow unauthorized access or privilege escalation. Attackers take advantage of open network shares, exposed admin interfaces (RDP, SSH) and weak domain trust relationships, which can create footholds for further attacks.
• Domain compromise paths focus on gaining control over Active Directory to manipulate authentication and authorization mechanisms. Attackers exploit DC Sync, DC Shadow and Golden Ticket attacks to impersonate privileged users and maintain persistent access to take over your entire domain.
• Attackers can exploit cloud and hybrid attack paths like misconfigured cloud environments, identity and access management (IAM) policies, exposed storage buckets and weak identity federation mechanisms to compromise cloud-based resources. By leveraging OAuth token hijacking or abusing hybrid Active Directory trust, attackers can move between cloud and on-prem environments undetected.

By incorporating APA into your security program, you can improve cyber hygiene by:

• Proactively anticipating and mitigating potential threats before they materialize.
• Deploying targeted defense security measures precisely where you need them most.
• Focusing on high-risk vulnerabilities to optimize security resource allocation.
• Enhancing incident response by detecting, analyzing and responding to security incidents.
• Addressing and prioritizing vulnerabilities that are part of high-risk attack paths to optimize vulnerability management and remediation efforts.
• Use visual attack path representations to better understand and communicate risks to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Use threat intelligence to prioritize remediation of the most critical vulnerabilities that pose a direct threat to your valuable assets.
• Support compliance by demonstrating control over security risks and vulnerabilities.

There are also benefits of attack path analysis in vulnerability management:

• Attack path mapping can help you find and prioritize your most critical vulnerabilities.
• Supports proactive risk assessments.
• Focuses on vulnerabilities on active attack paths to reduce wasted effort and resources.
• Helps increase attack surface visibility by revealing interconnected risks.
• Enables proactive risk management to support compliance initiatives.

Tools for automated attack path analysis work by:

• Visualizing relationships between assets, identities and vulnerabilities.
• Identifying toxic combinations and dangerous overlaps between configurations and permissions.
• Simulating attack scenarios by anticipating attacker movements based on known tactics and techniques.

When choosing an APA tool, ask:

• Can the tool assess all potential attack paths across the entire network with multi-domain coverage?
• Does it have intuitive, user-friendly and clear visual attack path representations?
• Can it flex and scale with your business needs and evolving network architecture?
• Does it seamlessly integrate with existing security tools and workflows?
• Does the vendor provide regular updates to address emerging threats and vulnerabilities?

1. Scope and discover: Define the boundaries of the analysis and identify critical assets (e.g., IT assets, databases, privileged accounts, domain controllers) to understand network layout. Your goal is to determine potential attack surfaces, such as internet-exposed services, misconfigured cloud resources or other security controls.
2. Aggregate and correlate data to map relationships between users, domain controllers, systems and vulnerabilities. This uncovers hidden attack vectors, such as weak credentials used across multiple systems or unpatched vulnerabilities that can lead to privilege escalation.
3. Use graph modeling and visualization to see how an attacker could move through your environment by exploiting vulnerabilities, privilege escalation, lateral movement or taking advantage of misconfigurations.
4. Prioritize remediation: Once you’ve identified potential attack paths rank them based on risk factors, such as exploitability (ease of attack), choke point prioritization, impact (business consequences) and likelihood (real-world attack techniques used in MITRE ATT&CK). The most critical paths like those leading to domain admin access or business-critical assets should have the highest priority.

Within the CTEM framework, APA:

• Identifies exposures by mapping potential attack paths.
• Highlights the most critical vulnerabilities that could lead to significant breaches so you can prioritize mitigation.
• Provides insights to inform proactive defense strategies to strengthen your overall security posture and enhance resilience.

APA supports reactive and proactive security measures:

• Reactive security: Assists in incident response by tracing attack steps, understanding its progression and identifying compromised assets.
• Proactive security: Helps your teams anticipate potential attack vectors and implement defenses to prevent exploitation.

Learn more about how attack path analysis through exposure management platforms like Tenable One can help you navigate the complexity across the modern attack surface. Today's complex environments, which extend beyond traditional IT, and include things like microservices, web apps, identity services, operational technology (OT) and so much more, require a diverse set of tools to asses vulnerabilities. A robust platform should help you anticipate, prioritize, and provide actionable insights.