Between rapid cloud expansion and shadow IT slipping under the radar, it’s all too easy for businesses to lose track of their digital assets. That’s why recognizing and mapping what assets exist is fundamental: businesses can’t protect what they don’t know they have.
Exposure Management (XM) is a critical tool in this environment, helping organizations gain clear visibility into their attack surface. Implementing robust XM practices is essential for maintaining cybersecurity across diverse environments and effectively addressing vulnerabilities.
The need for exposure management
Most companies accumulate legacy assets over time, resulting in digital clutter. This can become a serious security risk, especially if these older assets remain connected to the main IT network or, more worryingly, are exposed to the internet.
As organizations continue to integrate new technologies without retiring legacy technologies, they inadvertently create a tangle of outdated and poorly secured digital assets. These neglected assets can become potential gateways for cybercriminals.
Head of Attack Surface Management at WithSecure
With more than half of significant vulnerabilities tracked in 2023 being exploited by threat actors, understanding digital inventories is more important than ever. It’s not just about identifying risks, but viewing them within the operational context to prioritize and effectively address them. This approach helps organizations focus their efforts and reduce the potential for damaging cyberattacks.
Existing security stacks often lack context and prioritization and suffer from inefficiencies. Additionally, siloed security processes make achieving a unified security posture challenging. XM solves this by integrating disparate tools and processes and providing a comprehensive view of the attack surface. This approach highlights and prioritizes critical vulnerabilities within the business context, allowing for focused security efforts. By breaking down silos, XM improves organizational resilience and security effectiveness.
By aligning cybersecurity efforts with broader business goals, XM improves an organization’s security posture and resilience, ensuring the protection of critical assets and compliance with regulatory requirements.
What challenges does EM address?
XM encompasses a mix of mindset, framework and processes that improve the understanding, prioritization and mitigation of cyber risk across an organization’s entire attack surface. By viewing the IT environment through the lens of a potential attacker, XM enables organizations to assess where vulnerabilities may exist, how they might be exploited and how effective current defenses are.
At the heart of XM is the ability to define and continuously examine the attack surface, enabling organizations to pinpoint their most vulnerable assets. This focused approach ensures that security efforts are concentrated where they are most critical, rather than diluting resources across less critical areas. XM also increases visibility, ensuring that older, often overlooked systems are identified and included in security updates.
For example, consider two servers that are technically identical and are exposed to the same threats. One server may store non-sensitive image files, while the other contains sensitive customer data. It is clear that the server with sensitive data requires more immediate attention and robust protection.
XM is especially beneficial for mid-market companies, which typically have fewer cybersecurity resources than larger enterprises. It enables these companies to allocate their security budgets to achieve the greatest strategic impact.
By streamlining security operations, organizations can improve their efficiency in managing risk and enhance their ability to respond to threats. With an up-to-date perspective on vulnerabilities and threats, organizations can proactively prioritize risks and strengthen their resilience.
XM also helps apply business context to asset evaluation, prioritizing resources based on the criticality of the data they contain. So, XM not only helps cleanse and secure existing digital landscapes, but also protects future developments by maintaining a clear understanding of ongoing changes within the environment. This includes new additions to the environments, new workflows, or software updates with updated features and new access capabilities.
The Strategic Benefits of XM
XM focuses on securing potential breach points that attackers can exploit. The process typically begins with evaluating the external security posture, often through red teaming, pentesting, or manual EASM exercises. These exercises apply offensive cybersecurity tactics to identify vulnerabilities, providing a clear view of potential attack vectors.
This preventative identification allows organizations to address and strengthen vulnerabilities before they are exploited. This advantage is especially important when resources are limited.
By focusing on the most pressing vulnerabilities initially, organizations can build a solid foundation for their security strategies, significantly improving their defensive capabilities from the start. Actively managing and mitigating these vulnerabilities strengthens an organization’s resilience to cyberattacks.
Teams can also implement a continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) strategy to detect new issues as they emerge. This approach helps with compliance with NIS2 regulations, which emphasize risk management and require organizations to consistently identify and evaluate cyber risks.
Additionally, XM facilitates a comprehensive view of the attack path, integrating both internal and external threat detections. This holistic perspective is instrumental in strengthening an organization’s compliance readiness, improving assurance protocols, and managing supply chain risk.
With XM, companies not only develop stronger defenses against direct threats, but also take a proactive stance in comprehensive risk management.
Ultimately, exposure management is essential to helping organizations identify and secure their most vulnerable digital assets. By integrating this strategic approach, businesses strengthen their defenses against potential cyber threats and improve their overall operational resilience, ensuring robust protection and compliance.
We provide an overview of the best patch management software.
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