Introducing SIMAPTIC – An Automated Security Assessment Tool for Small Businesses and Regulatory Compliance

If you are reading this blog then you are probably already aware that cybersecurity has become one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today. We are no longer in a world where cyber attacks are confined to large enterprises worried about protecting intellectual property but one in which cybercrime impacts everyone. In 2025, estimates are that between 70-85% of organizations experienced some form of cyber attack and the average cost of a breach for a small business reached $120,000. Even more concerning for small businesses is that as many as 60% go out of business within 6 months of experiencing a significant security breach according to the Small Business Administration.

If the cost of cyber breaches wasn’t enough, small businesses are increasingly being required to comply with new and more stringent cyber security regulations. From Regulation S-P introducing new requirements for financial advisors to HIPAA update requirements and increasing US State regulations, small businesses have increasing burdens to perform regular and comprehensive cyber risk analysis for their organization.

Despite this, the costs for implementing and evaluating security for small businesses remain extremely high. Comprehensive security assessments often start at $10,000 or more. For many small organizations this cost is their entire security budget for the year and provides them with limited resources to implement findings and update their security posture. To address this shortfall in need and availability, we are introducing SIMAPTIC: an LLM-driven automated solution built on top of our open-source framework Empire.

Trusted Open Source Solution. New Capabilities

First, for our many Empire fans, let us address what will almost certainly be your first question, no, we are not close sourcing Empire, nor are we creating a closed source version of it. SIMAPTIC is an LLM driven controller that integrates into Empire and will not have any impact on how we run the Empire project.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Empire is an open source command and control (C2) framework that has become one of the most widely used tools in the professional cybersecurity community for conducting security assessments. With thousands of users globally – from penetration testers and red teams at Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and academic researchers – Empire has earned its reputation through years of real-world use, community contributions, and rigorous public scrutiny of its codebase. That breadth of adoption matters: when SIMAPTIC runs an assessment, it is using the same techniques and tradecraft that professional security teams rely on every day, giving you a genuine picture of how a real attacker would approach your network rather than a sanitized simulation. The transparent, open-source nature of Empire also means you are never asked to trust a black box, the framework underpinning SIMAPTIC has been reviewed, tested, and validated by the global security community.

Full Internal Network Testing, not just Web and APIs

Utilizing an agentic AI implementation, SIMAPTIC provides fully automated network testing and unlike many tools currently on the market, it is capable of full internal network assessment. It will conduct host and network reconnaissance across the whole network, identifying attack paths and changing tactics when a course of action is thwarted. This is a significant increase in capability from other AI driven tools that are only able to assess single workstations or web applications. While other tools on the market are capable of internal assessment they require that either the vendor hard code attack paths or that the customer create the attack path themselves. When these coded paths encounter roadblocks they are often unable to continue with the assessment and can provide a false sense of security, reporting that the campaign was successfully blocked.

Additionally, the manual construction of campaigns results in delays to updating the tool and keeping it current, requiring customers to wait for the vendor to publish new campaigns or having their own staff dedicate time and resources to constructing new ones themselves. SIMAPTIC is capable of being updated to a new campaign with a single prompt, drastically reducing the time needed for campaign updates and ensuring that the tool always behaves like the most up to date threats.

Use of the tool is easy: you simply log in and download an executable from your selected campaign. From there, the controller will take over, leveraging the Empire framework to execute just like a real world attacker or tester would. Tests are on demand and can be run multiple times to verify findings.

Once the test completes, a report is automatically generated with a campaign overview, modules run, and actions taken, mapped to both the MITRE ATT&CK framework and NIST 800-53 rev 5 controls. This creates an easy-to-understand report and a means of conducting quick risk assessment profiles for small businesses. For organizations needing to meet SEC compliance requirements, the NIST controls provide an ideal way of understanding exactly where network security shortfalls occur and allowing you to quickly build a plan for remediation to show SEC inspectors.

We built SIMAPTIC because we believe that every organization, not just those with enterprise security budgets, deserves to know where they stand. The reality is that the small accounting firm, the regional healthcare provider, and the independent financial advisor are all facing the same threat actors as the large corporations making headlines when they get breached. The only difference is that those larger organizations have the resources to test their defenses continuously. SIMAPTIC closes that gap. For a fraction of the cost of a traditional security assessment, you get automated, on-demand testing built on the same framework used by the world’s leading security professionals, with reports that give you a clear roadmap for improving your security posture and meeting your compliance obligations.

If you’re ready to find out what an attacker would actually see on your network, we’d love to show you. Head over to simaptic.ai to request a demo or get started with your first campaign today.