A Step-by-Step Guide to Securing Your IT Assets and Optimizing Attack Surface Management

In 2024, worldwide IT spending by organizations is forecast to grow YoY by 6.8% to total a massive $5 trillion.¹

There are solid reasons why modern companies spend so much on procuring and upgrading IT assets: to meet their business goals, solve complex problems, and boost process efficiency and personnel productivity. IT is also a crucial catalyst of business innovation, which in turn drives an organization’s competitiveness, revenues, profitability, and growth.

Considering that an organization’s IT assets are crucial to its survival, it’s imperative to secure them and prevent their exploitation and compromise. This step-by-step guide will show you how.

Step 1: Create an IT asset inventory

An IT asset inventory is a list of all the IT assets – hardware, software, cloud systems, data, networks, etc. – that your organization owns, leases, and uses. The simple rationale behind creating the inventory: you can only protect the assets that you know about.

Ideally, the inventory should be placed in a centralized location and regularly updated. This will allow IT and security teams to keep track of each asset and secure it with appropriate controls. An up-to-date inventory also minimizes the problem of shadow IT, which is a growing security challenge for organizations worldwide.²

You can create your asset inventory in one of two ways:

Manually

Conduct an inspection of all IT assets and populate a shareable document like a spreadsheet. This method is suitable if the number of assets in your tech stack is small. However, if your tech stack is large – and getting larger by the day – manual inventorying will be too time-consuming.

Another problem is if new assets are being added or existing assets are being upgraded (or removed) at high velocities. Since manual inventorying is very slow, by the time your inventory is ready, it will already be obsolete.

Deploy an Attack Surface Management solution

Powerful ASM solutions can eliminate the problems associated with manual inventorying through automation. These solutions also identify “exposed” assets and pinpoint their critical attacker entry points. So, even if your IT ecosystem evolves very quickly, the solution will ensure that your asset inventory is always up-to-date, and provide a useful starting point for asset testing and risk remediation.

Step 2: Classify assets

After creating an IT asset inventory, the next step is to classify the assets. Classification enables security teams to determine what kind of controls to implement to secure assets and mitigate their attack risk.

One of the easiest ways to classify IT assets is to use a pre-existing classification framework like the ISO/IEC 27002.³ Although more known as a standard to implement an Information Security Management System, its guidelines and recommendations can also be used to classify IT assets.

A modern ASM solution can also help with asset classification. Advanced solutions categorize assets based on numerous factors like risk criticality, sensitivity, and business relevance. This will also aid in creating an effective roadmap for further testing using tools like automated penetration testing and red teaming.

Step 3: Perform a risk assessment on the assets

After inventorying and classifying all your IT assets, it’s important to understand where each asset is at risk and how critical it is to the business. Here’s where a detailed risk assessment can help.

Post this assessment, you should be able to answer two crucial questions:

• How will the business be affected if this asset is compromised in an attack?

and

• What might the extent of the damage be?

Risk assessments are easy to do with ASM solutions. Automated, AI-powered ASM platforms perform detailed risk assessments on exposed assets, identify assess potential threats, and assess attacker profiles and TTPs to provide a more complete picture of vulnerable, at-risk assets.

Step 4: Prioritize assets

At this point, you know:

• Which IT assets in your organization are most exposed

and

• What are the possible attacker entry points in each asset

Now you can start thinking about ways to remediate the risk to vulnerable assets.

But first, the assets must be prioritized. In Step 3, we analyzed the business criticality of each asset and predicted the potential impact of an attack on that asset. Use this information to prioritize assets for remediation.

Asset prioritization will help you to assign resources (time, money, people) where they are most likely to generate the maximum benefit for the organization. It will also guide your remediation efforts so you can implement the most appropriate controls to better protect at-risk assets.

ASM solutions simplify prioritization and build a roadmap for remediation. The most effective platforms assign a “risk score” to each asset. This risk score, based on detailed analyses of open-source intelligence (OSINT), CVSS scores, and known breach data, is very useful for gaining a comprehensive view of the attack surface, and more importantly, to identify, prioritize, and remediate the risk to the most vulnerable and/or business-critical assets.⁴

Step 5: Remediate risk

Now that you have identified exposed assets, assessed the extent of exposure, and prioritized assets for remediation, you can implement remediation measures. Many such measures are available:

You can implement a data encryption solution to encrypt all sensitive, confidential, or business-critical data and minimize the impact of a data breach.

You can also work with software vendors to discover and patch zero-day vulnerabilities.

It’s also advisable to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) to prevent unauthorized or malicious parties from accessing your IT assets.

Other useful risk remediation tactics include:

• Adopt a defense-in-depth (multi-layered) security architecture to more comprehensively protect IT assets.
• Implement the principle of least privilege (also known as Zero Trust to limit access to assets.
• Conduct user awareness training to make users more aware of the security risks to IT assets.
• Regularly assess asset configurations and fix misconfiguration errors on priority.
• Set up a third-party risk management (TPRM) program to assess, monitor, and mitigate the risks to your IT assets (not to mention, data) emerging from third parties.

Step 6: Reaching Security Control Optimization

The threat landscape and your attack surface are constantly evolving. Since new vulnerabilities and threats can emerge at any time, it’s crucial to continuously identify, analyze, and remediate the risks to IT assets.

One way to do this is by leveraging offensive security to find the right mix of technology to reach security control optimization. Offensive security aligns common security and business goals of improving security posture proactively before a threat occurs. Providing a unified framework to foster collaboration with a shared understanding of security priorities and proposed actions to reduce risk.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in Continuous Attack Surface Discovery and Penetration Testing. Continuously discover, prioritize, and mitigate exposures with evidence-backed Attack Surface Management, Penetration Testing and Red Teaming.

Elevate your defense strategy with an attacker’s view that goes beyond common vulnerabilities and exposures. Each risk we uncover is backed by validated evidence. We test your entire attack surface and help you mitigate your next cyber breach before it occurs.

Know your risk. Contact BreachLock today!

References

1. Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 6.8% in 2024
2. New Report: 85% Firms Face Cyber Incidents, 11% From Shadow IT
3. ISO/IEC 27002:2022
4. NIST National Vulnerability Database