If you’re running an in-house security team, you know the struggle is real.
Year after year, we champion the importance of security. The budget is approved, the new appliances are installed, the talent is hired, and the team works around the clock. But what are the results?
At the board meeting, the questions are always the same: “How much did we actually spend on security? What value did it bring? Should we increase the budget next year?”
And when a business unit faces an issue, their first thought is often, “Did the security team block something again?”
At times, the security department feels like a combination of a scapegoat and a clean-up crew. When things are quiet, you’re invisible. The moment something goes wrong, all fingers point at you.
Trying to prove your value feels like an uphill battle.
If you claim to have prevented potential losses, who would believe it without concrete proof?
If you say you’ve improved capabilities, how do you quantify that? It often comes across as a stream of technical jargon that no one understands.
Today, let’s tackle the tough “whys” that keep us up at night. More importantly, let’s discuss how we can clearly demonstrate the value of our security work, present our case to the board with confidence, and make every dollar of our budget count.
I. The “Whys” That Haunt Our Security Teams
1.“What is my Web Application Firewall (WAF) actually blocking? Can it even keep up with the latest attack techniques?”
The logs are an endless waterfall, and real threats are lost in the noise. The sales pitch was fantastic, but attack methods are evolving daily. Are we getting the latest threat intelligence and converting it into effective defence policies? How often are the WAF rule sets even updated?
Did we spend a fortune on a false sense of security, or worse, an outdated one?
2.“With countless vulnerabilities, which one do we patch first? Which one is the hacker’s most likely next target?”
A single scan reveals a flood of high and critical-risk vulnerabilities. But when you flag the one with the highest CVSS score, the business unit says the system can’t be taken offline. Besides, can hackers genuinely exploit all these “theoretically” high-risk vulnerabilities? More importantly, among all these flaws, which are Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV), which are predicted to be exploited soon based on the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), and which does AI analyse as the highest risk for our specific industry and assets?
Are we performing precision strikes with our patching efforts, or just firing blindly?
3.“This new EDR/XDR slows down our endpoints, but has it ever caught a real intruder? Can it intelligently identify sophisticated attacks?”
They say behavioural detection is powerful enough to catch unknown threats. But in reality? It’s either a barrage of false positives or complete silence. Can it truly detect AI-generated attack variants or meticulously crafted low-and-slow attacks through intelligent analysis?
Is the product failing us, are we using it wrong, or is our “intelligent” defence simply not intelligent enough?
4.“We’ve run countless security awareness training sessions, but employees are still clicking on phishing emails. What now?”
The training materials have been distributed, and everyone passed the tests. Yet, when the next phishing simulation goes out, the click rate remains stubbornly high.
Is it due to employee carelessness? Is the training content out of touch with reality? Or is training alone simply not the answer?
5.“My boss wants to know: how does our security posture compare to our competitors? Is our investment sufficient to handle future threats?”
How am I supposed to know what my competitors are doing? Even if I did, our industries and business models are different—how can we make a fair comparison? More critically, how do we prove that our security investments are not just for countering known threats, but are also preparing us for emerging threats, based on predictive intelligence and AI?
Without a clear benchmark for comparison or forward-looking risk insights, how can we demonstrate the strategic value of our investments?
Do these questions hit close to home? These “whys” are precisely where we get stuck when reporting to leadership, and they are the questions that demand the clearest answers.
II.Let Your Security Results Speak for Themselves
If explaining isn’t working, it’s time to stop telling and start showing. We need a way to let our security effectiveness speak for itself. How?
The core idea is this: Instead of waiting for an attack, we need to proactively and safely simulate one. By using simulated real-world attacks—ideally powered by the latest threat intelligence and AI-driven analysis—we can transform “possible,” “maybe,” and “theoretical” risks into tangible, visible issues. This equips us with solid evidence for our reports to leadership.
1.Test Your Firewall/IPS/WAF with the Latest Attack Playbooks
- How to do it: Don’t just trust the vendor reports. Use a tool that continuously integrates the latest threat intelligence and, ideally, uses AI to generate targeted attack scenarios. Simulate the latest OWASP Top 10 attacks, targeted APT kill chain fragments, and early-stage ransomware behaviours directly against your network perimeter and core applications.
- What to look for: Which attacks were blocked? Which security control blocked them? Was it logged? Was an alert generated? And which attacks sailed right through? Crucially, how did our defences react to simulations based on the very latest threat intelligence?
- How to report: “We ran a simulated attack campaign based on the latest threat intelligence, with attack scenarios generated with AI assistance for our specific environment. The results show our WAF has a 90% block rate against Type-Y attacks but only 30% against Type-Z attacks, which leverage a new vulnerability that intelligence shows is trending. We recommend adjusting WAF policy X to mitigate this immediate threat.”
2.Prioritise Vulnerabilities Based on Exploitability, Not Just Theory
- How to do it: CVSS scores and EPSS predictions are just reference points. The key question is: can a hacker actually exploit this vulnerability in our environment? A proper validation method combines threat intelligence to tell you if exploit kits for a vulnerability are publicly available, while using AI to analyse the probability and potential impact of a successful exploit on your specific assets and business context.
- What to look for: Which high-risk vulnerabilities are actually “dormant volcanoes” in our environment due to network segmentation? Conversely, which low or medium-risk vulnerabilities have become “ticking time bombs” because threat intelligence shows they are actively exploited in the wild, or AI has flagged their high relevance to our critical business systems?
- How to report: “This month, we identified 100 high-risk vulnerabilities. By combining threat intelligence with AI-powered risk analysis, we pinpointed 5 that are actively being exploited by threat actors and pose a direct threat to our core ordering system. We have prioritised and patched these 5, and the rest are being triaged based on their AI-generated risk score and business impact.”
3.Put Your EDR/XDR to the Test with Advanced Attack Variants
- How to do it: Don’t wait for a real breach to test your EDR. Regularly run harmless attack scripts on test endpoints using open-source or commercial attack simulation tools. To truly test its intelligence, use a platform that leverages AI to generate variants of known attacks or simulate evasive techniques based on machine learning.
- What to look for: Did the EDR/XDR generate an alert? Was the alert accurate? Could it trace the attack behaviour? Was the response workflow smooth? Most importantly, how did it perform against AI-generated, non-standard attacks?
- How to report:: “We tested our new EDR solution using a batch of simulated attack variants generated with AI assistance. It successfully detected and blocked 70% of these advanced variants, representing a significant uplift over traditional signature-based detection. This demonstrates its intelligent analysis capabilities against unknown and mutated threats.”
4.Evolve Security Awareness from Training to Targeted Improvement
- How to do it: Continue the training, but place more emphasis on regular and varied phishing simulations. After each drill, don’t just reprimand—analyse. What types of emails are most effective? Which departments have the highest click rates? Is the issue the subject line or the sender’s name?
- What to look for: The trend in the click rate over time. Even more importantly, has the rate at which employees report suspicious emails increased?
- How to report: “Following six months of continuous phishing drills and targeted awareness reminders, the phishing email click rate in our XX department has dropped from 30% to 10%, and the rate of employees proactively reporting suspicious emails has increased by 50%.” This is far more powerful than saying, “We conducted XX training sessions.”
5.Benchmark Against Yourself and the Attacker—with Foresight
- How to do it: Stop worrying about comparing to competitors in a vacuum. Instead, establish a security baseline founded on your own business risks and simulation results. This baseline should continuously evolve by integrating the latest threat intelligence and using AI to forecast trends, helping you identify the most likely future risk vectors.
- What to look for: Are our key metrics improving or declining? When a new attack technique or threat emerges, can our current defences handle it? What is the gap? Are our security strategies being proactively adjusted based on intelligence and AI-driven warnings?
- How to report: “Compared to six months ago, we have not only reduced our response time to known attacks by XX%, but more importantly, by integrating continuous threat intelligence and AI analysis, we have identified and fortified 3 weak points that were likely future targets. This demonstrates our security investment is shifting from reactive defence to proactive, predictive readiness.”
3.Introducing the Atlas Cybersecurity Validation Platform: AI + Intelligence to Deliver Deeper Insights
At digiDations, we built the Atlas Cybersecurity Validation Platform to help you systematically, efficiently, and safely carry out the proactive “test yourself” strategies mentioned above, all backed by hard data. With the release of our new 4.0 version, we have embedded powerful AI and threat intelligence engines at its core to make cybersecurity validation smarter:
- Wondering if your security controls are effective or just running silently? Want to know if they can withstand the next wave of attacks? Our threat intelligence engine continuously feeds the platform with the latest attack techniques and vulnerability exploits. The AI engine then intelligently generates and optimises attack scenarios based on this intelligence and your unique environment, ensuring your validation is always aligned with the current threat landscape.
- Need to know which vulnerability is your biggest liability? Want your risk assessment to be more precise and predictive? Our platform shows you which vulnerabilities are being actively exploited. The AI engine then provides a comprehensive analysis, intelligently assessing the true risk and potential business impact of any gaps found during validation. This helps you cut through the noise and focus on what truly matters.
- Want to make a more persuasive case for your security budget? Need to prove your strategy is both effective and forward-thinking? We provide detailed validation reports that use data to show exactly how much your defensive capabilities have improved after every enhancement. More importantly, these reports, built on AI and threat intelligence, help you articulate how your security spend is not only addressing known threats but also preparing you for the risks of tomorrow. These reports are your most powerful asset when presenting to leadership.
In short: we help you turn “hypothetical threats” into “validatable scenarios” and transform a “vague sense of security” into Valuable Security Metrics. Through the dual power of AI and intelligence, the ATLAS platform makes your cybersecurity validation smarter and your risk insights deeper. It ensures that every dollar you spend makes an impact you can see, so you can stand confidently before your leadership.
Working in corporate security is challenging. But we can’t remain stuck in a cycle of being unable to explain or prove our value. By taking the initiative, speaking with data, and embracing new technologies like AI and threat intelligence, we can pave a path to greater value for ourselves and our profession.