Why Every Organization Should Prioritize Cyber Asset Protection – Attack surface management helps teams see and secure what attackers can discover as they probe their networks. This is critical since it takes only about 16 hours for an attacker to scan your network, find a vulnerable asset, and exploit it.
A comprehensive attack surface management solution enables you to detect these vulnerabilities in a shorter timeframe than attackers, reducing the risk of data breaches and maintaining customer trust.
Table of Contents
Why Every Organization Should Prioritize Cyber Asset Protection
Real-time Visibility
Ensure you choose an attack surface management solution that automatically discovers and monitors internal and external assets using API integrations. This eliminates the need for manual processes and homegrown systems to collect asset data, enabling rapid vulnerability discovery, risk assessment, and remediation.
Complete and continuous visibility into an organization’s cyber assets helps significantly prevent vulnerabilities and misconfigurations from slipping through the cracks as those assets change over time. It also enables security teams to respond quickly to threats, minimize the impact of breaches, and maintain a strong security posture.
The best CAASM solutions will identify rogue assets in your environment — including malware, compromised infrastructure, or services enabled by shadow IT — and enable you to take action immediately. They must employ a post-perimeter approach that looks beyond the firewall and focuses on attackers’ reconnaissance techniques. This includes DNS lookups, mirroring, IP address spoofing, and URL hijacking. They should also be able to tap into threat feeds and enable active threat hunting so practitioners can spot potential risks as they emerge.
Detection
Detecting unknown and rogue assets is crucial to eliminating the risk of cyberattacks. Most breaches today come from an entry point that is either unknown to security teams or ignored as unimportant. With the rise of shadow IT and new remote work capabilities, it is easier than ever for employees to access the corporate network with personal devices that IT doesn’t control.
A modern attack surface management solution is designed to discover both unknown and rogue assets by using techniques that mimic the tools used by malicious actors. This helps security teams understand what they have and where vulnerabilities lie in their digital or physical attack surfaces.
Once the attack surface is fully understood and mapped, intelligent prioritization can be performed to determine which risks to address first.
Prioritization
The attack surface management program must continuously identify assets, prioritize vulnerabilities based on their impact, and determine their exposure level. It also must ensure that an organization’s cyber asset register is accurate and up to date, including new assets that may be connected to the network – such as those in subsidiaries or shared networks or devices brought in by employees who work remotely.
A comprehensive CAASM solution uses unified cyber threat intelligence to provide security teams with detailed context to boost cybersecurity operations and accelerate SecOps actions. By merging structural data and API integrations, CAASM solutions enable organizations to quickly gather and view all internal and external cyber assets and their associated vulnerabilities for a unified view of the attack surface.
This allows organizations to identify all internet-facing assets – whether on-premises or in the cloud – including routers, servers, workstations, IoT and other devices, websites, user directories, and more. Then, the platform automatically prioritizes and remediates vulnerabilities based on their impact and exposure level.
Actions
You can’t test your attack surface once and be done – it continuously grows every time you add a new device, user account, or workload. This expansion creates more opportunities for attackers to exploit misconfiguration vulnerabilities and expose sensitive data.
Effective attack surface management involves continuous discovery, identification, classification, and prioritization of your assets. These processes mimic the mindset and toolset of hackers to improve the visibility of all your exposed assets, including those on-premises, in the cloud, or hosted by third parties.
Effective attack surface management also ensures that discovered assets and vulnerabilities are enriched with critical context, such as business context (owner, purpose), current use, and connection to other assets. This helps security teams to rule out risks quickly and focus remediation efforts effectively. In addition, a practical attack surface management solution should enable the handoff of contextual information between teams that understand the risk and how to fix it (security operations) and those who work to remediate vulnerabilities and improve their defenses (IT Operations). This speeds up the process and helps close gaps before attackers take advantage.