How to Manage Vulnerabilities in Your External Asset Inventory

As global events have sped up digital transformation around the world, internet-facing assets are connecting to company networks online that are unmonitored, unsecured, and vulnerable.

From a sheer numbers’ standpoint, cyber assets significantly outnumber employees from 564 to 1 in the enterprise. Meanwhile, the average enterprise security team is tasked with overseeing 165K cyber assets. This has left understaffed, budget-strapped security teams scrambling to manage their expanding attack surface and growing risks associated with rogue assets that are not being tracked in their cyber asset inventory.

These digital assets are increasing at such an exponential rate, assets can remain undiscovered and unknown to security teams tasked with routine monitoring of external assets – many of which are stored within third party apps, open-source repos, or public clouds, like AWS or Google Cloud. Examples of these include an outdated GitHub repository, a compromised IoT device, or an unmanaged Kubernetes cluster. In a recent study, researchers discovered 240K Kubernetes clusters publicly exposed to the internet. Adversaries can scan for these external nodes online and hijack k8 clusters for their own purposes – significantly increasing the risks of cryptomining, sensitive data leaks, and lateral movement on cloud resources.

These are the types of external vulnerabilities that require a proactive cybersecurity risk management strategy to reduce the organization’s external attack surface.

The External Attack Surface Is Vulnerable

The driver for the growing demand for external attack surface security stems from the changing paradigms of the working environment.

Three recent trends have added more external attack surface risks that cybersecurity professionals have to manage, including:

• The contextual shift to hybrid and remote workplaces;
• The use of public cloud resources increasing risks to cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments; and,
• The use of personal assets on company networks.

These recent developments have triggered the adoption external attack surface management (EASM) with both vendors and enterprises incorporating it into their security protocols either through product development or partnerships. Banking, telecom, and SaaS companies are taking the lead using EASM as a core function within security programs. Highly driven organizations that have an expanded attack surfaces and a high potential for unknown assets are the most likely to adopt EASM tools and/or partner with EASM solution providers that offer similar cybersecurity services, including vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, breach and attack simulations, etc.

External Vulnerabilities Are Increasing

The biggest hurdle facing security teams in managing their external attack surface today is the inability to identify the most critical vulnerabilities on external-facing assets continuously. The lack of visibility to the associated assets that form their external attack surface is hindered by the following issues:

1. Inaccurate Mapping of the External Surface
Mapping the external surface can be quite challenging, considering how ubiquitous and distributed assets can be today. As organizations have shifted from a closed IT framework to boundary-less organizations, digital assets may have been deployed across multiple locations without an asset inventory system in place to track them. These assets may be hosted externally on third-party cloud servers, which makes them nearly impossible to monitor. Moreover, the wide variety of dispersed assets makes it quite challenging to identify and safeguard assets, especially in global and multi-national enterprise environments. These gaps create critical blind spots for in-house security teams, as increased risks from rogue, unmonitored assets continue to expand the external attack surface.

2. Lack of Asset Governance
Skipping the official channel for the creation of communication pathways or digital products can often lead to increased inventory of internet-facing assets unknowingly. Teams often end up creating cloud instances or websites without any approval from the respective cybersecurity leadership. The demand for meeting the deadline often results in ghost websites or unmanaged web applications that are unmonitored by the SOC and vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

3. Shadow IT
Online tools are being deployed by employees often without seeking the right approval from key personnel. As a result, “shadow IT” resources are generated, and security teams are left unaware and unable to protect and defend the organization if any of those assets are attacked. The lack of tracking leaves security teams unable to monitor these assets and patch them when they become vulnerable and expose the organization to external attacks.

4. Inadequate Tools
Automated security tools today are noisy and difficult to manage. Tools that monitor the activity on the attack surface generate large volumes of data and hundreds of alerts that security teams must investigate every single day. Left untuned, these tools waste valuable time in the Security Operations Center – as alerts are not prioritized, and many are false positives. When security teams are alert fatigued and wasting time on investigating false positives, the risk of missing an actual, real-time threat increases.

Improving Asset Vulnerability Management Now

While organizations are playing catch up on asset inventory management, these vulnerable, rogue assets continue to expand attack surfaces that cyber criminals can see. Cumbersome asset inventory processes, like manual tracking in spreadsheets and internal surveys, are inadequate and prone to human error. Left unmonitored, these external assets are vulnerable and easy targets for malicious hackers.

Cyber asset management can no longer be ignored as a function in the security program. Effective protection requires the right tools to address the growing attack surface and the proliferation of digital assets. To combat the exponentially growing attack surface risks, security teams responsible for safeguarding these assets are turning to a new solution that offers continuous visibility to external attack surfaces to manage vulnerabilities, fix weak controls, and track rogue assets known as External Attack Surface Management – aka EASM.

 How Does EASM Improve Vulnerability Management?

The process of managing vulnerabilities involves continuously identifying, assessing, and mitigating vulnerabilities throughout an organization. As a supportive function, the maintenance of the digital asset management program is critical. However, even with the right technology and security talent, the routine task of identifying assets exposed to the internet is complex and prone to human error. Detecting rogue assets that are hosted in third-party data centers or the public cloud requires dedicated expertise and advanced scanning technology.

When the management of the external attack surface has gaps, asset inventories may be inadequate or out-of-date. This security gap can result in an organization’s cloud-hosted assets being missed in the vulnerability management program. This is where an EASM tool can fulfill continuous asset discovery and vulnerability assessment with consistency and accuracy to reduce the risks associated with asset vulnerabilities on the external attack surface.

What does EASM do?

EASM is focused upon the external attack surface management of internet-facing assets – which involves technical and strategic steps to identify such exposed systems and servers and then managing the associated vulnerabilities on-going. The external surface doesn’t just simply refer to the public-facing websites. The external attack surface also includes assets available in third-party clouds, exposed servers, dark web disclosures, etc.

EASM functions as a framework for the identification of the various risks and vulnerabilities associated with external-facing assets, followed by continuous monitoring and their scrutiny for risk identification. As the risks are identified, EASM ensures a process is in place to rank the risks based on the severity of the potential breach damage. Considering the escalating exposure of external assets to attackers, EASM tools are popular among cybersecurity professionals.

See External Threats with SET for EASM

BreachLock understands the importance of managing known and unknown external resources. With SET, BreachLock’s EASM platform, you can see external threats for yourself while the SET platform continuously assesses and scans the internet-facing resources that your organization owns.

SET offers organizations a one-point solution to strengthening their EASM program. With clear remediation guidance, visibility, and open-source intelligence, SET enables CIOs and CISOs with capabilities to see all their real-time assets across the internet and protect them. The security team can now manage risks and vulnerabilities that are compromising internet-facing assets associated with your network on an intricate level.

BreachLock’s EASM platform helps increase the speed of DevSecOps teams to ensure complete protection of the organization’s cyber security is externally protected with a real-time internet-facing asset inventory that is updated, patched, and monitored.

As a robust external attack surface management platform, SET continuously discover external assets online and offers the following capabilities to enable DevSecOps teams:

• Real-time asset inventory for continuous vulnerability monitoring and management
• Quantifies the total number of exposed known and unknown assets online at any time
• Categorizes and scores risks and vulnerabilities to support team prioritization
• Geo-location to document the asset’s physical location with associated IP address
• Enables rapid remediation using each asset’s details, context, and vulnerabilities identified
• Critical external exposure tracking on business-essential websites and digital assets to identify new vulnerabilities in the event of a real-time attack
• Scans for breached credentials on the internet and dark web for credentials that may also be in use on the company network

When it’s time to enable the security team with a better solution for external attack surface management, the SET EASM platform from BreachLock supports your organization’s known and unknown internet-facing assets that may be exposed to cyberattacks around the clock. With next generation EASM security in place, you can prevent cybercriminals from breaching an external asset and using it as a vector to establish a foothold in your network. Schedule a discovery call with BreachLock to see your external threats with SET.