Challenge of Attack Surface Management

IT environments are built to be fluid. They emerge naturally due to cloud computing, unsecured networks, SaaS deployments, containers, microservices, IoT devices, applications, infrastructure, and data frequently introduced without regard for enterprise security requirements. Complications such as legacy sprawl, orphaned infrastructure, and a more dispersed workforce are always present. Even with specialized technologies, security teams cannot monitor and handle the full of their rapidly expanding attack surface.

What is Attack Surface?

First and foremost, it's critical to comprehend what we mean by the attack surface. Whether secure or vulnerable, known or unknown, the total amount of an organization's attacker-exposed IT assets, in use or not, regardless of IT or security team awareness. The attack surface of a company changes over time. It comprises digital assets on-premises, in the cloud, subsidiary networks, and those in the environments of third-party vendors.

What is Attack Surface Management (ASM)?

Attack Surface Management gives cyber security teams a complete, accurate picture of their environment as seen by an attacker. This module transforms security programs from reactive to proactive by operationalizing attacker intelligence. It provides invaluable all-encompassing visibility of an organization's assets, allowing security professionals to know exactly what needs to be protected.

Why Attack Surface Management Matters?

Around 84 percent of the business, IT, and security executives believe cyber risk has increased in the past two years. Sixty-eight percent of firms that have experienced a cyber-attack started with an unknown, unmanaged, or poorly-managed company asset, and 75 percent believe they will be targeted again. Organizations are lagging in this area. What is the risk? While the cyber-defenders struggle to understand ASM, attackers use automated techniques to find assets, identify weaknesses, and conduct attacks. Many of these assaults are also thriving. That's one of the reasons I think 2022 will be a significant year for attack surface management technology, which finds internet-facing assets, classifies them, assigns them a risk score, and makes remedial suggestions.

How does attack surface management safeguard against cyber-attacks?

Attack surface management is a five-step procedure that keeps your company informed about the most relevant threat vectors.

Locate Assets

You cannot manage an asset if you are unaware of its existence. Most businesses have many unknowns, including assets hosted on third-party sites, workloads running in public cloud settings, IoT devices, abandoned or obsolete IP addresses, credentials, Shadow IT services, etc. Legacy tools and processes easily miss these attack surface items. Even yet, utilizing the same sophisticated reconnaissance techniques as attackers, a modern attack surface management application and solution can find them swiftly.

Perform Continual Tests

You can't just test your cyber-attack surface on the surface once. It grows daily as you add more devices, users, workloads, and services. As it grows, so does the security risk. Not only are new vulnerabilities a concern, but so are misconfigurations, data leaks, and other security flaws. Testing for all possible attack routes is critical, and it should be done regularly to keep your knowledge up to date.

Connection

Business context and ownership are critical components of attack surface management since not all attack vectors are created equal. Legacy tools and methods, on the other hand, rarely give consistent context, making it challenging to prioritize fixes. For an effective attack surface management technique, information such as IP address, device type, whether it is currently in use, purpose, owner, linkages to other assets, and possible vulnerabilities inherent within it are all necessary. This can assist your security team in prioritizing the cyber risk and determining if the asset should be taken offline, removed, fixed, or merely monitored.

Prioritize

Your security team's list of potential attack vectors will almost certainly be longer than your IT team's ability to validate and remediate. That's why you must gather all of that information to use it to direct the cleanup teams' efforts. In addition to business context, variables such as ease of exploitation, discoverability, attacker priority, and remedial complexity can help you identify the most critical risks.

Remediate

After you've thoroughly mapped and contextualized your attack surface, you may start remediating in order of importance. Discover how to streamline the information flow between the tools and teams that understand the risks and their priorities and the teams responsible for removing them to make your remediation as efficient as possible. Sharing corporate context and problem-solving knowledge speeds up the process and builds trust.

Summary

To summarise the topic, security teams need a 360-degree view of their digital attack surface to detect threats, protect their organizations, and identify and halt an ever-changing array of adversary techniques. This necessitates a constant awareness of all assets, including the organization's internal networks, their existence beyond the firewall, and the systems and entities with whom users and systems interact. Maintaining sight of a vast attack surface might become increasingly difficult if firms pursue a digital transformation strategy. If we don't have experience, Attack Surface Management will become more challenging to manage in the following years as attackers update their knowledge with new technology.