Cyber Security Validation and Exposure Management

What is Cyber Security Validation?

Simply put, Cyber Security Validation embeds highly automated, repeatable, and predictable security testing features into one platform to ensure comprehensive solutions and greater testing accuracy across an organization’s entire ecosystem’s defenses and incident response capabilities.

These cyber security validation solutions can be both human-delivered and automated tools to test the efficacy of an organization’s security controls and identify exposed assets and their most critical attacker entry points. The results of these assessments should be totally transparent to the security service client and include clear reporting of the testing results and security remediation recommendations from their vendor.

Nevertheless, demand for a more comprehensive and integrated approach to identifying threats and exposures is driving the convergence of existing security offerings into a more closely integrated set of solutions; hence, integrated automated solutions that are repeatable and scalable to ensure predictable benchmarks and goal setting to help security professionals accurately measure security improvements and progress over time. This will be influenced by the need to identify actual risk versus a simple overview of risk and exposure.

A few examples of such cyber security validation tools include Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), Attack Surface Management (ASM), Exposure Management (EM), and automated penetration testing and red teaming.

However, at the core of cyber security validation is Attack Surface Management.

The Linchpin of Cyber Security Validation

Attack Surface Management (ASM) has now become the linchpin of cyber security validation as it creates a starting point for testing by identifying exposed assets and associated vulnerabilities. By starting with ASM to identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities, it accelerates risk prioritization of exposed assets and their most critical attacker entry points to significantly improve cyber defenses. This is a monumental change as it ultimately reduces the effort required to identify what assets to test based on an organization knowing its actual risk.
Once actual risk is identified, this creates a realistic roadmap for use by other security solutions such as automated pentesting and red teaming, which ultimately saves valuable time, costs, and resources.

What is Exposure Management?

Exposure Management is defined as a set of processes and capabilities that allow enterprises to evaluate the visibility and validate the accessibility, exposure, and exploitability of an enterprise’s digital and physical assets continually and consistently.
Exposure Management is about seeing your attack surface from an attacker’s point of view – but one can argue that is no longer enough. Security service clients must go beyond an attacker’s view and common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) for the process of discovery, prioritization, and remediation of potential threats and vulnerabilities within their security ecosystem.

So, what is missing?

For Exposure Management to be effective, it must align with ASM for broader impact. And, for ASM to support Exposure Management, it will need to focus not only on the continuous visibility of an enterprise’s digital presence on the public-facing internet, but on greater context around all digital assets – both internal and external.

Providing Context through ASM

Context is not providing the visibility itself of an attacker’s view of exposed assets and related vulnerabilities. Instead, context should be filled with deeper and more enriched insights into the discovery of the exposed asset. Context should answer such questions as:

1. What is the level of attractiveness of the assets for an attacker?
2. What is the ease of exploitation of the asset(s)?
3. Does your security team have a clear view of all attack paths an attacker will take to exploit an asset?
4. What are the necessary refinements of findings during reconnaissance?

In essence, the typical process of asset discovery and prioritization is limiting if there is no context available, as it doesn’t answer important questions like those above. It just provides an outside view looking in. So, context becomes a crucial consideration for risk-based prioritization which is a key component of Cyber Security Validation and Exposure Management.

Risk starts with first identifying actual risk – knowing it. So, risk-based prioritization is based on known risk and its context. So, when organizations are prioritizing exposed assets and vulnerabilities, they are doing so based on knowing actual risk and evidence-based context – deeper insights around the asset, ease of exploitation, the attacker and potential attack paths, etc. – not just simple visibility of an attacker’s view or CVEs. This can be accomplished by using ASM as a starting point, collectively with other cyber security validation tools, to provide enterprises with a realistic understanding of their full attack surface to determine how they will respond to an attack.

Market Evolution

The demand for advanced cyber security technologies and services that can act as a unified source of technical input to closely support security operations that better weigh and analyze against business risk serves as an actionable catalyst for evolution. Context of identified exposures correlated with the likelihood of exploitation is key. And security service providers who understand this will be instrumental in providing the emerging technologies necessary to eliminate siloes and apply integrated solutions across both internal and external environments.

Today, threat and exposure management is conducted as part of separate activities and tools. But this is slowly changing. The need for the integration of security solutions has never been so evident. The pressure to assess an enterprise’s security defenses and readiness, which includes exposed assets and those that can be easily exploited, proper configuration of controls, understanding attackers and critical attack paths and entry points, all are activities that should be supported in a unified single source of truth.

The market is seemingly transitioning towards a more centralized ASM approach to Cyber Security Validation and Exposure Management, though it currently predominantly consists of separate solutions that need to evolve in the coming years. Security professionals and their organizations will encounter numerous and crucial security decisions in 2024 specific to their industry. Thus, cyber security service providers must take the lead in redefining their product offerings, integrating, and sharing features and functionalities that intersect to become more effective.

Petitions for a more comprehensive and integrated ASM approach to identifying threats and exposures will drive the convergence of existing security offerings into a more closely integrated set of solutions delivered through one seamless platform. This will be influenced by the need to go beyond an attacker’s view and common vulnerabilities and exposures to support context-driven testing activities provided by continuous and automated solutions.

In conclusion, ASM represents an opportunity across various use cases and stages, to evolve from stand-alone purchases to closely integrated deployment alongside broader solution sets, meeting the need for advanced technologies and services that can act as a unified single source of truth across the security ecosystem for all enterprises.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in offering human-delivered, AI-powered, and automated solutions for Attack Surface Management (ASM), Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) and Automated Pentesting (APT) and Red Teaming as a Service (RTaaS). We go beyond providing an attacker’s view of common vulnerabilities and exposures to provide enterprises with a realistic view of their full attack surface to accelerate risk prioritization and remediation accuracy across the entire security ecosystem.