Understanding cyber asset attack surface management and its purpose is crucial to improving your cybersecurity posture. Unified cyber asset attack surface management provides a clear view of your organization’s internal and external digital assets for faster risk response.
Asset Discovery
An organization’s digital ecosystem is vast, comprising a variety of assets, including networks, cloud services, IoT devices, and software. Many of these assets are unknown, making them a significant risk to an organization’s security posture.
Unknown assets often introduce flaws in the security controls that attackers can exploit. An efficient CAASM solution will automatically detect and map these assets, making them visible to the security team. This allows for faster threat response and improves the MTTI of vulnerability management. In addition, an effective CAASM solution will provide details on the current state of each asset, such as installed software, unused licenses, hardware lifespan, and more.
To identify & prioritize vulnerabilities effectively, discovery processes must be automated. This helps reduce the noise caused by conflicting data sources and prioritizes those vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited.
Vulnerability Assessment
An organization’s vulnerability assessment identifies and classifies vulnerabilities that hackers and cybercriminals may exploit to access their assets and systems. This can include network-based scans to identify vulnerable devices and networks, host-based scans to identify potential rogue systems, and web application assessments to find SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that are common attack methods.
The information gathered from these scans provides the security team with an inventory of all internal internet-facing assets and enables them to prioritize remediation.
It also helps them identify the areas that pose the greatest risk to the business, such as phishing attack vectors, sensitive data stored in public cloud platforms or ephemeral systems like code repositories, mobile & IoT devices, and complex digital supply chains.
Remediation
IT teams are overwhelmed with data and devices to manage, whether on-premises or in the cloud, in a corporate network, or at remote locations. Keeping track of all the different systems and software can only be possible with the right tools, especially when those systems are not connected to the company network.
The best CAASM solutions use API integrations to deliver a comprehensive, unified view of the organization’s attack surface. The solution then scans that surface from both the inside-out and outside-in, uncovering any vulnerabilities that could be exploited to launch a cyberattack. Once a vulnerability is discovered, remediation processes can begin.
This might include hardening the asset through system updates, deploying new software or configurations, resetting passwords or restricting access to assets, eliminating rogue assets, or removing unnecessary permissions. Some remediation is even automated with integration-based alerts and action or playbook-based steps that guide administrators through the process.
Monitoring
You can’t secure what you don’t know about. That’s why cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) is necessary for any security program. CAASM solutions enable businesses to gain visibility into their internal and external attack surfaces. They do this by establishing risk benchmarks that allow a business to prioritize its efforts to minimize vulnerabilities and the associated risks of cyberattacks and data breaches.
Once an organization has determined the assets that comprise its attack surface, it can begin systematically hardening those assets through discovery and remediation activities. These might include identifying and securing unmanaged IT, securely retiring orphaned IT, integrating subsidiary assets into the company’s cybersecurity strategy, policies and workflows, and more.
CAASM also continuously monitors internet-facing assets to detect vulnerabilities and attacks in real-time and alert security teams. This eliminates alert fatigue by providing contextualized, assessed, and severity-scored findings to inform security response and remediation decisions.
