Attack Surface Management – Going Beyond an Attacker’s View

The critical need for enterprise organizations to know their actual risk beyond just a simple overview of risk and exposure is more evident than ever. According to a recent MIT Technology Review Insight survey, around 50% of cyberattacks originate from unknown or unmanaged digital assets. To mitigate risk effectively, enterprise security leaders need a clear understanding of the attractiveness of their assets from an attacker’s perspective, how easily their assets can be exploited, which attack paths an attacker would take to exploit them, and the refinements of findings necessary during reconnaissance.

What is Attack Surface Management?

Attack surface refers to all potential points of entry or vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit to gain a foothold in an organization’s systems or network. It includes all internal and third-party software applications, network equipment, endpoints, cloud services, and even partners, supply chain vendors, and employees. With the adoption of cloud, rise of remote work, and proliferation of IoT devices, the attack surface has expanded exponentially.

Attack Surface Management (ASM) is a cybersecurity practice focused on identifying, assessing, and prioritizing an organization’s points of exposure for remediation, a.k.a its attack surface. Exposed assets can be both internal — such as corporate endpoints, internal APIs, and servers — and external — like web applications, cloud services, usernames, and passwords that are exposed on the Dark Web.

Generally, ASM involves the following processes:

1. Asset Discovery: Attack Surface Management solutions identify and catalog all exposed/internet-facing digital assets, including those owned by third parties, such as cloud service providers, supply chain vendors, contractors, or partners.
2. Asset Inventory and Classification: Next, ASM solutions label identified assets according to their risk tolerance, sensitivity, and importance to business continuity.
   Vulnerability Identification and Risk Assessment: ASM solutions then analyze potential risks by assessing vulnerabilities, threats, and attacker TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) pertaining to the assets.
3. Asset Prioritization and Risk Scoring: Based on insights from the risk assessment, the platform prioritizes vulnerabilities for remediation – known and unknown – based on their risk scores, which are determined by the severity and potential impact on the organization’s operations and the bottom line and OSINT, CVSS, and known breach data.
4. Remediation and Reporting: Finally, it reports the newly discovered vulnerabilities and issues and suggests remediation steps.

Why Should Your Organization Implement Attack Surface Management?

Attack Surface Management offers organizations complete visibility into their digital footprint and provides actionable insights regarding cybersecurity risk mitigation. Beyond these obvious benefits, here’s why ASM is an imperative for today’s organizations:

1. Risk-Based Starting Point for Security Testing

The Attack Surface Management process not only identifies all assets, but classifies them based on their criticality, sensitivity, and relevance to cybersecurity and business continuity. It highlights the most critical assets and vulnerable entry points for attackers, which can then serve as a starting point for security testing initiatives, such as penetration testing and red teaming exercises. This risk-based prioritization for security testing offers contextual insights into the most vulnerable areas of organizations’ attack surfaces, enabling them to focus their testing efforts on areas that need it the most. It results in efficient resource allocation, faster and more accurate security testing, and better outcomes by mitigating high-risk security threats and vulnerabilities first.

In fact, ASM and PTaaS (Penetration Testing as a Service) and red teaming often go hand in hand, as the rich contextual data from ASM solutions enables more strategic and targeted pentesting and red teaming activities. For instance, if an ASM platform discovers a newly-exposed asset, automated pentesting may be used to exploit that vulnerability to better understand the relevant threats and attack tactics. All of these tools and technologies can co-exist and collectively work together to fortify the organization’s cybersecurity resilience.

2. Expanding Perspectives Beyond an Attacker’s View

Unlike defensive cybersecurity procedures, ASM proactively identifies and prioritizes exposed vulnerabilities and associated vulnerabilities. It provides organizations with a deep contextual understanding of their digital assets, going beyond what an attacker can perceive from the outside. The Attack Surface Management processes provide actual risk across all critical entry points across both internal and external attack surfaces.
In an evolving and increasingly sophisticated threat landscape, ASM helps organizations uncover exposed assets and their vulnerabilities before they can potentially be exploited by attackers.

3. Managing Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)

Common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) is a list of publicly known cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The purpose of CVE is to provide a common language and platform for sharing and remediating cybersecurity vulnerabilities as they emerge. However, being publicly accessible, they are equally accessible to malicious threat actors as well. Threat actors can start scanning for vulnerable internet-facing assets within minutes of a CVE disclosure. According to CISA, threat actors can exploit vulnerabilities within 15 days of their CVE disclosure. With robust Attack Surface Management, organizations have access to a complete and updated inventory of all internal and external assets along with the applicable CVEs as soon as they are disclosed. Frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, OWASP Top 10, and NIST CSF are also used to assess the risk of CVEs for optimal prioritization.

Attack Surface Management Made Easy with BreachLock ASM

BreachLock’s Attack Surface Management solution swiftly identifies and prioritizes risks and exposures across both internal and external attack surfaces. It highlights exposed assets and critical entry points, providing a strategic starting point for more granular pentesting and red teaming initiatives. By leveraging BreachLock’s Attack Surface Management solution alongside its PTaaS and RTaaS solutions, organizations can expedite and optimize their testing processes based on risk-based prioritization, saving valuable time and resources. Organizations can identify precisely which assets to test and where to concentrate their cybersecurity efforts, all based on real-time, accurate risk assessments.
Interested in learning more about how BreachLock’s ASM solution can help strengthen your cybersecurity posture? Schedule a discovery call with BreachLock today!

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.