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Examination of Attack Area Managing against Exposure Oversight
Managing the attack area involves the continual process of uncovering and recognizing assets that can be visible to a potential hacker on the web. This shows where security weaknesses lie, where they can be exploited for an attack, and where security measures are strong enough to fend off an intrusion. Anything on the internet that can be taken advantage of by a hacker typically falls under the umbrella of attack area management.
Expanding further, exposure management incorporates data assets, user identities, and cloud account setup. It can be described as the methods that enable organizations to regularly and reliably evaluate the visibility, accessibility, and susceptibility of their digital assets.
The Uninterrupted Voyage of Threat Administration
Continual oversight is crucial for various reasons. Your enterprise, your attack area, and the threat environment are not fixed; they are in a constant state of flux and development. New vulnerabilities emerge regularly, new exploitations for old vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed, and threat actors continuously refine their tactics. Furthermore, new systems and services are frequently exposed to the web, and if you engage in CI/CD processes, your applications are regularly updated, potentially creating exploitable security holes.
Progressing Past CVEs
In recent times, vulnerability management has been narrowly viewed through the prism of vulnerabilities with associated CVEs. Intruder’s team challenges this stance, asserting that any weakness in your attack area is a vulnerability, regardless of the presence of a CVE.
Thus, unlike the limited scope of vulnerability management, exposure management considers the broader spectrum – encompassing misconfigurations and possible weaknesses without CVE associations. Take the instance of SQL injection; even without a CVE, it is a vulnerability in your application with potential severe consequences if exploited. Similarly, exposing Windows Remote Desktop to the internet, although lacking an associated CVE, introduces a risk that attackers may exploit. Ultimately, exposure management provides a unified approach to perceiving and addressing these threats.
Assigning Priority to Vulnerabilities: The Necessity for Context
Presently, many vulnerability scanners furnish a list of vulnerabilities, each as an independent kernel of information. For instance, they might notify: ‘System X has vulnerability Y; you should rectify it.’ Yet, when tackling numerous vulnerabilities, this data alone is inadequate.
Effective prioritization demands additional context to ensure that your team’s limited resources are concentrated on issues that genuinely have an impact. It is vital to discern which assets uphold your critical business processes, which vulnerabilities can be linked to affect critical operations, and where intruders might infiltrate your network if these assets were compromised.
This approach shifts the handling of vulnerabilities from fragmented and detached activities to a unified strategy, offering the context required to decide not only whether a vulnerability needs fixing but also when.
Just as meditation aids in sifting through the daily influx of thoughts and distractions, Intruder’s exposure management technique endeavors to sieve through the clamor to pinpoint the significant issues.
Why Exposure Oversight Holds Significance
The importance of exposure management lies in the fact that not everything that can be rectified should be immediately addressed. Lacking a strategic approach, you run the risk of squandering valuable time rectifying minor issues, such as an unverified TLS certificate on an internal network,instead of tackling weaknesses that may result in jeopardizing a critical system.
Your team can significantly impact your organization’s risk profile in a more profound way by dedicating more time to strategically crucial tasks that enhance your organization’s security more effectively. This can be accomplished by refraining from immediate responses to each vulnerability (similar to playing whack-a-mole), which is the aim of exposure management.
To reduce the workload of your team, you can define the scope of your environment, identify assets that support vital business processes, assign specialized teams responsible for fixing those assets, and establish criteria or triggers for determining when issues require attention.
The importance of exposure management
Starting the journey to effective exposure management
- Utilize existing resources: Begin by leveraging your current services. For instance, if you are utilizing a tool like Intruder, you already have a provider for vulnerability management and attack surface management, kickstarting your exposure management approach. Alternatively, engaging a consultancy service can conduct attack path mapping exercises and threat profile workshops.
- Delineate your scope: When defining the scope of your exposure management process, prioritize assets exposed to the internet, as they are often the most susceptible to attacks. Intruder can assist by offering a view of your internet-facing systems, serving as a starting point for your exposure management initiative. Utilize Intruder’s target tagging to categorize systems within your defined scopes. During scoping, also identify individuals accountable for mitigating risks when vulnerabilities are found; enlist them in Intruder to empower them to rectify and validate issue resolutions. If data permits, keep track of the SaaS applications utilized, as they may contain sensitive data and credentials.
- Identify and rank your assets: Employ a tool to identify known and unknown assets, determining the criticality of assets that align with your previously defined scope. Intruder automatically discovers new cloud assets by integrating with your cloud accounts and conducts automated subdomain checks. Enhance asset context by utilizing tags to clarify how systems contribute to business processes and the risks they pose if compromised.
- Unearth and prioritize vulnerabilities: Focus on evaluating which assets are most susceptible to compromise and would be lucrative targets for cyber attackers. Intruder assists in identifying vulnerabilities in your infrastructure, applications, and APIs, presenting a prioritized list of issues to address first. Moreover, Intruder continuously discovers and prioritizes vulnerabilities by monitoring your network, revealing exposed components and initiating scans when changes occur.
- Take action: Proceed with remediation, mitigation, or risk acceptance. Intruder streamlines managing and validating your remediation endeavors. Conduct remediation scans, export issues to your ticketing systems, configure alerts in Slack and Teams, and more.
Concluding remarks
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