Attack Surface

Understand Your Attack Surface

See Exactly What Attackers See

See What Attackers See

Attackers are looking for the path of least resistance in your attack surface so that they can break into your high-value digital assets. To stay ahead, you have to think like an attacker too. That requires ongoing visibility of your attack surface, and there’s only one proven way to establish attack surface visibility, and that is to do what attackers do: perform reconnaissance across your entire IT ecosystem, using an outside-in approach.

With the full view of your attacker-exposed assets, you have a good foundation for evaluating your organizational risk and establishing an effective security program that allows you and your team to focus your resources on eliminating the highest priority risks for your business.

Whitepaper

Attack Surface Visibility: The Foundation of Effective Cybersecurity

In order to protect your most-valued assets, you must have visibility across your entire attack surface, right down to the last connected device. Is your visibility up to the task? Download the paper to read about:

The foundational role that visibility plays in your security approach
Where legacy security testing systems leave gaps
Five critical points to consider when mapping your attack surface

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What is an attack surface?

Learn about an attack surface and more industry terms in our glossary.

Suggested Terms:

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Identify and Eliminate Shadow Risk

Attackers often find your security blind spots – your shadow risk – by targeting the IT assets connected to your organization that you don’t know about or manage: assets in partner, cloud and subsidiary environments.

Your shadow risk goes undiscovered by the legacy security risk assessment solutions you use (e.g. vulnerability scanners) because they were designed for the IT environments of twenty years ago, not the IT ecosystem at the heart of your business today. The same is true of attack surface discovery tools like those from RiskIQ and Expanse, which are simply port scanners working within defined or easily discovered IP ranges.

Elimination of shadow risk by illuminating critical blind spots in your attack surface is a goal and an outcome of using the CyCognito platform. The CyCognito platform helps your team discover and understand more about your attack surface, and not just discover open ports.

CyCognito platform also filters out the noise resulting from the use of vulnerability scanners which surface an endless stream of potential vulnerabilities that may be rated as “high” or “critical” using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), but do not rise to a priority level for your organization. Attack vectors identified by the CyCognito platform go beyond known vulnerabilities and isolated CVSS scores and are specific to your organization’s attacker-exposed assets and their business relevance.