How CyCognito Streamlines Risk Remediation and Validation
Protecting your attack surface and preventing exposure of critical corporate assets — customer data, intellectual property, financial reports, critical infrastructure — from would-be attackers is a continuous and time-consuming process.
Your proactive defense efforts can never rest, and the CyCognito platform helps ensure that you are optimizing your team’s time and resources to achieve optimum results while providing complete visibility over your attack surface. You can reduce the time for remediation and validation from months to days. And time spent analyzing and reporting on your progress can be cut from hours to minutes.
Learn how the CyCognito platform streamlines your security testing while giving you complete visibility over your entire attack surface. Five best practices below are outlined below:
01
Risk Prioritizations Based on Business Context
Quickly Understand the Risks That are Most Significant for Your Organization
The CyCognito platform stands alone in the industry in its ability to automatically and effectively help you prioritize the critical risks in your attack surface that you should remediate first. Prioritization is based on analysis from the attacker’s point of view — what is easiest and most desirable to compromise — in combination with the importance of the asset and the potential impact of the issue to your organization.
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Integration with popular ticketing systems, ServiceNow and Jira, helps you efficiently assign issues to the appropriate team members and track issue resolution within established IT workflows. Custom alerts about specific issues and new assets added to the attack surface can also be automatically directed to these ticketing systems.
Figure 1. Prioritization of the cybersecurity risks most relevant to your organization helps you reduce the time for remediation and validation from months to days.
02
Actionable Remediation Guidance
A key benefit of the CyCognito platform is the actionable remediation guidance it provides for every issue that it detects. Regardless of your team’s security expertise, your teams benefit from the platform’s detailed remediation steps and documentation that includes supporting research. References to vendor patches, procedures, and threat intelligence research helps your team increase their knowledge while saving time and streamlining operations.
Sophisticated teams save time because they don’t have to do their own investigation about best approaches; less mature teams benefit from expert advice they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Figure 2. For every issue that the CyCognito platform identifies in your attack surface, you are provided a detailed description and actionable remediation guidance; additional references are commonly provided as well.
03
Easily Validate Remediation Status
After your team remediates issues, the CyCognito platform helps you efficiently validate that all of the issues have been effectively resolved with each data update. CyCognito’s Attack Vector Reports provide an ongoing status of these critical issues, giving you insight into whether remediation progress is improving, declining, or remaining constant. You can also rescan selected assets for ad hoc validation.
Figure 3. Efficiently validate resolution of issues with each data update.
04
Continuously Measure and Monitor Your Team’s Progress
The CyCognito platform delivers trend analysis and custom dashboards to help you effectively monitor and measure your team’s performance against your risk management objectives.
Trends are collected for each organization, its subsidiaries, teams, and the asset groups within, which include platforms, environments and business units.
The data that’s collected for the asset groups includes:
- Security grade
- Issue attributes:
- status
- severity
- location
- investigation status
- threat
- type
Custom dashboards within the platform help you display and efficiently report on the metrics that are most important to you. Reports can be exported in a variety of human-readable and machine-readable formats including .pdf image, CSV, JSON or other popular formats.
An immediate view of the security grade trend for every asset group is also available in the platform’s central dashboard view when you mouse over the asset group as shown to the right in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Instantly view an asset group’s security trends by mousing over it in the CyCognito platform’s central dashboard view.
Figure 4. Quickly analyze your attack surface trends and export the data in the format of your choice.
05
Share Meaningful Data Trends to Your Security Leaders and Board of Directors
Just as it's better to proactively defend your attack surface than reactively clean up after a costly breach, it’s most effective to proactively communicate with your leadership team about your organization's security posture, your resource allocation, the security of each of your subsidiaries and each security team’s demonstrable progress.
Dashboards within the CyCognito platform, customized for your organization’s needs, provide impactful, significant metrics that you can share with security leaders and your Board of Directors.
Our customers often select an Attack Surface dashboard, an Organizations Comparison dashboard, an Issues dashboard and an Issues Trend dashboard to share with their executive board. These dashboards have sufficient details to be meaningful but are also high-level enough to communicate well to strategists.
The data can be exported in the format of your choice so it can be added to presentations or flow into Governance Risk and Compliance systems.