Free Book - External Exposure & Attack Surface Management for Dummies
The key to protecting your organization and preventing cyberattacks
Attack surface management is the continuous process of discovering, classifying and assessing the security of all of an organization’s assets. This vital risk management process is now being aided by various attack surface management solutions available in the market.
With the rush to digital transformation, your attack surface has both grown exponentially and become immeasurably harder to define and defend. Add to that the rise in cyberattacks and breaches, and it’s evident why continuous attack surface management is imperative.
Effective Attack surface monitoring and management is a process that enables you to continuously discover, classify and assess the security of your IT ecosystem. The process of attack surface management tools can be broadly divided into two categories:
An attack surface is the sum of an organization’s attacker-exposed IT assets, whether these digital assets are secure or vulnerable, known or unknown, in active use or not, and regardless of IT or security team awareness of them.
An organization’s attack surface changes continuously over time, and includes digital assets that are on-premises, in the cloud, and in subsidiary networks, as well as those in third-party vendors' environments. Due to this complex web, cyber asset attack surface management tools are becoming more critical.
You don’t have to look far to find stories about the danger of ever-growing attack surfaces.
Take the SolarWinds attacks in which malware was introduced via organizations’ supply chains, routes that are often overlooked on the assumption that they are implicitly secure. This exploit continues to turn up victims, including the email systems of government and international aid agencies that have been critical of the alleged perpetrators.
Another oft-forgotten attack vector is out-of-date software and hardware that is still in use, such as the exploited remote code execution vulnerabilities that have existed on Microsoft Exchange servers as far back as 2010. Remote code execution vulnerabilities were also exploited in attacks against Accellion customers using the company’s legacy File Transfer Appliance (FTA).
Ransomware, as demonstrated by the recent Colonial Pipeline attack, is another example. The attack targeted remote services such as Citrix, Remote Desktop Web (RDWeb), or remote desktop protocol (RDP) to initially gain unauthorized access. Because organizations are working with largely-remote workforces due to the pandemic, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
In each of these breaches, attackers made their way in through a route that was either unknown by security or considered unimportant. Given the vast number of devices and services spanning your enterprise, it is easy to see how something could be overlooked, especially if you are examining your attack surface from the perspective of most security teams– that is to say, the inside out.
But that's not how attackers think.
Today’s sophisticated attacks involve extensive, automated reconnaissance efforts that analyze your attack surface from the outside in. This perspective often reveals a completely different picture of the only attack surface that matters – the one attackers can exploit.
The only way to effectively defend against attacks is to take an attack surface management approach that provides the same continuous visibility into your security gaps as attackers have – outside in – so you can remediate issues before they become exploited.
Download CyCognito’s State of External Exposure Management Report to learn key recommendations that your Security teams can implement to improve their exposure management strategy and minimize risk.
When you are ready to go beyond legacy systems to manage your cybersecurity risks, the CyCognito attack surface management solutions can help elevate your continuous discovery, testing and vulnerability management. It preempts cyber attacks like ransomware and others and helps satisfy key elements of most common security frameworks and many regulatory compliance standards.
The attack surface management platform component achieves this by discovering and testing your entire security controls in digital attack surface by the attack surface management tools, prioritizing what needs to be fixed first, integrating with and orchestrating existing workflows, and automatically validating remediation.
Effective attack surface management is a continuous, five-step process used to keep your organization up-to-date with the most important attack vectors.
CyCognito provides our company with cutting-edge technology enabling my team to have global visibility into our web-facing assets in an easy-to-use interface.”
Enterprise teams must decide whether to select a pure-play or bundled solution for external attack surface management. This report outlines the respective pros and cons.
CyCognito is solving one of the most fundamental business problems in cybersecurity: the need to understand how attackers view your organization, where they are most likely to break in, and how you can efficiently analyze, monitor and eliminate risk.