Inside the Mind of the Adversary: Why More Security Leaders Are Selecting AEV

Cybersecurity involves both playing the good guy and the bad guy. Diving deep into advanced technologies and yet also going rogue in the Dark Web. Defining technical policies and also profiling attacker behavior. Security teams cannot be focused on just ticking boxes, they need to inhabit the attacker’s mindset.

This is where AEV comes in.

AEV (Adversarial Exposure Validation) is an advanced offense technology that mimics how adversaries will attack your system, while providing remediation strategies. It lets you discover and address how your environment can be exploited and what the impact of the exploitation could be, in a dynamic and ongoing way.

In this article, we’ll share everything you need to know about AEV, and how your team can leverage it to build continuous resilience against attacks.

What is AEV?

According to the Gartner® Market Guide for Adversarial Exposure Validation (March 2025), AEV is defined as “technologies that deliver consistent, continuous, and automated evidence of the feasibility of an attack.” AEV operates by emulating cyber-attacks, providing organizations with an understanding of how attackers can infiltrate their networks. This allows organizations to take relevant security measures to effectively remediate security gaps.

AEV technologies effectively consolidate previously isolated security testing methods, like Automated Penetration Testing and BAS (Breach and Attack Simulation). Gartner says “As the two markets developed and overlapping capabilities increased, the two functions converged to unite offensive technologies”.

AEV’s focus is on replicating an actual adversary’s mindset. By combining the breadth of automated pentesting and the impact-driven focus of BAS, AEV enables continuous testing that mirrors how real attackers adapt over time. Organizations can continuously emulate how attackers operate, providing a more insightful confirmation of vulnerabilities and how to best fix them.

How AEV Supports Exposure Management

AEV emerged as a technological solution to support CTEM (Continuous Threat Exposure Management) practices. CTEM is an all-encompassing program that helps organizations identify vulnerabilities and exposures, determine the risk profiles of digital assets, prioritize their risk mitigation, and then monitor remediation.

Here’s how AEV facilitates CTEM:

• Filtering Mechanism – Instead of generating massive lists of generic findings, AEV narrows down the vulnerabilities found to be actually exploitable. A process that confirms the legitimacy of security issues and assesses how easily they can be accessed by threat actors. This approach is far more efficient than traditional patch-everything methods as it only flags the highest-risk issues, and in the process identifies exposures that are benign and don’t actually warrant remediation.
• Continuous Nature – Rather than a one-time event or a brief engagement, AEV’s ongoing and frequent automated tests support CTEM’s continuous feedback loop of discovery, testing, and remediation. This helps to ensure a perpetual state of attack readiness even in the face of new threat techniques and as the IT environment changes and new software misconfigurations develop.
• Real Testing – Staging environments often fail to accurately represent the actual conditions in which attackers would exploit an environment. These include misconfigurations, dormant user accounts, data anomalies, and complex integrations. Some best-of-breed AEV tools address this by testing safely in production environments, making them far more accurate and effective at identifying vulnerabilities that could lead to a disastrous impact.
• Remediation Beyond Patching – Beyond just patching exploitable CVEs, AEV identifies non-patchable vulnerabilities for remediation, like replacing exposed credentials, implementing the principle of least privilege, fixing misconfigurations, replacing insecure third-party software, and more. This is aligned with CTEM’s remediation guidance, which holistically seeks to reduce exposure to potential threats and risks.

AEV for Red Teams

AEV automatically identifies how an attacker might chain together multiple vulnerabilities across different environments. This makes it a staple in any red teamer’s toolkit.

With AEV, red teams can more easily model attack scenarios. This includes complex ones like attackers hopping between cloud infrastructure and on-prem systems or pivoting through different network segments, while overcoming existing controls and combining low-scoring exposures into a full-scale breach.

Equipped with information provided by AEV, red teams gain a clear view of how a determined attacker might move laterally, allowing them to scale their efforts and fast-track mitigation. For the organization, AEV ensures cost-effective red-teaming and even allows for entry-level red-teamers to provide quality results. GenAI is expected to augment this even further by providing ideas and explanations for complex attack scenarios.

AEV for Blue Teams

For blue teamers, AEV provides a strong head start. With AEV, defenders can see in the face of an attack which protections are really robust, which require strengthening, and which controls are in fact redundant. This helps defenders ensure that their security posture is working at its best using a trending analysis to show that the program works as expected.

Blue teams can use insights and data from AEVs for:

• Detection stack tuning
• Preventive posture changes
• Exposure prioritization
• Service provider performance validation
• Security vendor performance scorecards
• Other operations or controls improvements

AEV for Security Resilience

AEV is designed to provide continuous, automated, and realistic simulations of how attackers could exploit weaknesses in an organization’s defenses. No wonder it is quickly emerging as a pivotal technology in cybersecurity. With AEV, security teams are getting that proven validation of how exposures in their environment could be exploited and to what end, enabling smarter prioritization and effective remediation at a faster pace. This necessary clarity is key to fostering cyber resilience.

To learn more about how to implement AEV, and its role within a wider CTEM practice, register to attend Xposure, Pentera’s Exposure Management Summit.

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