Public Sector Attack Surface Management & Protection
Eliminate Agency Cybersecurity Risks Before Attackers Exploit Them
01 Discover and graph relationships between internet-exposed assets
CyCognito’s discovery process reveals more of your attack surface than you know about.
The CyCognito platform’s deep discovery capabilities and comprehensive approach offer 3x the visibility of the simple port scanning approach typically used by attack surface mapping products. The CyCognito platform maps your entire attack surface, whereas existing tools and processes typically cover only 30%-70% of it.
The CyCognito platform takes the attackers’ perspective so you see your attack surface the way they do. The platform starts by finding all the agency IT assets, including those that may be shared resources, joint programs, or cloud assets. This comprehensive, attacker-like discovery uncovers parts of your extended IT ecosystem that are most likely unknown, thus untested, unprotected, and vulnerable.
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The platform looks across the entire internet for your agency’s web applications, IP addresses, data repositories, certificates, and more. It extracts information like links, headers, banners, deployed software, and unique keywords that identify additional connections between assets that are not clearly or traditionally related. When discovered by attackers performing reconnaissance, these difficult-to-find connections provide an easy path into your agency.
As a result of graphing your agency’s relationships and the platform’s iterative reconnaissance, your organization has visibility to previously unknown, unmanaged, and abandoned assets in your IT ecosystem.
The CyCognito platform identifies previously unknown assets in your attack surface and helps you view them from an attacker’s perspective.
02 Determine agency and mission context
Automated classification improves understanding and situational awareness
The CyCognito platform uses intelligent, iterative analysis to automatically classify and organize 84% of your external attack surface assets by their agency or division context and relationship to your organization. Other attack surface management products require manual processes to accomplish this.
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The platform shows which assets and data belong to what departments or subsidiaries within your organization, the business processes associated with the assets, and what risks and attack paths the assets expose. For those small numbers of assets that aren’t automatically attributed to an organization, the platform includes easy-to-use tools to help you quickly assign them. And the benefit of the automatic classification and the time-savings for your team becomes exponential with the constant evolution of your external attack surface.
Note that every point of data the CyCognito platform accesses is available to anyone with an internet connection, and while attackers regularly make full use of that data, until now defensive cybersecurity solutions have not. By enabling your organization to quickly and continuously understand the content, context, and risk of each asset, you can also understand what’s most attractive to attackers and where their paths of least resistance lie.
The CyCognito platform automatically assigns assets to the appropriate agency, division, environment or subsidiary.
03 Test asset security at scale
Automate security testing of assets across your entire external attack surface
With no configuration required, the CyCognito platform goes beyond basic attack surface management to deliver attack surface protection by testing your entire attacker-exposed IT ecosystem for attack vectors that could provide malicious actors entry to your most critical agency assets.
As a result of its broad discovery and automated testing, the CyCognito platform enables you to improve vulnerability management coverage of your exposed IT ecosystem from its current scope (often only 30%) to 100%. The platform’s testing process does not affect system integrity and does not require an allowlist or other configuration or integration.
The CyCognito platform gives you a continuously updated view of the risks in your external attack surface.
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The CyCognito platform exceeds attack surface management products by using automated security testing techniques. The platform goes further than VA products, looking beyond common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) to detect data exposures, misconfigurations and even zero-day vulnerabilities.
Attackers are relentless, your defensive attack surface protection system must be just as persistent.
04 Prioritize risks and weaknesses
Not all attack vectors are created equal. Prioritize based on your criticality.
The CyCognito platform identifies and prioritizes your most critical risks, making it easy for your defensive security teams to know where to focus first when correcting security issues. The platform’s automatic risk prioritization is based on attackers’ priorities as well as the attractiveness of an asset, discoverability, ease of exploitation, and remediation complexity. The CyCognito platform delivers clear and effective prioritization to cut through the noise and identify your most critical risks.
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Our unique analysis distills most critical attack vectors that account for the majority of your risk. These prioritized attack vectors typically include exposures that no other solution identifies.
The CyCognito platform also determines an overall security grade for the assets in your attack surface, and groups and grades assets by organizations, environments, agency divisions, and platforms. Without requiring any user input, these asset groupings within your organization are automatically mapped, providing you with attack surface protection guidance that has context for visualization, reporting, and trending.
The CyCognito platform automatically prioritizes the thousands of issues in your attack surface to
identify the most critical so you know where to focus first.
05 Accelerate & Validate Remediation
Save time with guidance to remediate issues, and automatically validate fixes
The CyCognito platform decreases mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) risks and validates fixes from months to days or even hours, optimizing team productivity and reducing the window of exposure. Other products simply do not focus on remediation.
For every risk that’s identified, the CyCognito platform provides detailed and actionable remediation guidance so your security and operations teams don’t have to manually research or validate that information. It provides the evidence you need, including how risks were discovered, so you can confidently remediate or mitigate them.
The CyCognito platform streamlines your remediation efforts with actionable remediation guidance for your attack surface risks, along with evidence and helpful references as appropriate.
Preconfigured dashboards offer you quicker visibility to your key attack surface metrics and drilldowns into the details. All dashboards can be filtered by tags, agencies, divisions, locations, and (if applicable) teams. The Attack Surface Dashboard is the default dashboard that offers you instant visibility to the status of your attack surface from a number of dimensions. You can easily see the organizational attribution, asset classifications by platform and identification of vulnerable infrastructure.
Once attack surface issues have been addressed, the platform’s continuous testing process enables you to efficiently validate that your remediation efforts were successful. Your remediation progress can be shared with your leadership team or used for mandated reporting to document compliance.
The CyCognito platform has analytics and trends features to help you extract key insights from your attack surface data and report on them. Analyze and report on your agency’s security posture, including trends, to demonstrate how you are managing cyber risk. You can see overall trends as well as trends for asset groups.
See How We Do It
CyCognito solves one of the most fundamental problems in cybersecurity: the need to understand how attackers view your organization, where they are most likely to get in, and how you can efficiently analyze, monitor, and eliminate risk.
