The growing number of IoT devices, cloud services and mobile devices, in particular, are contributing to this trend. As the number of connected devices increases, so too does the number of potential vulnerabilities. The problem with combatting the vulnerabilities stems from the fact that tools and processes of yesterday are being used to solve today’s problems – built and designed for the old era of IT when the cyberattack surface was a static laptop, desktop or on-premises server. As a result, organisations struggle at every step – seeing their assets, detecting weaknesses, prioritising issues for remediation, measuring risk and comparing to peers – preventing them from confidently managing and reducing cyber risk. It’s quite clear that in this new digital era, we require a new approach.
The single most effective way to regain control of the constantly evolving elastic attack surface is to be able to identify and assess every asset across any computing platform with live visibility. This enables organisations to understand their true level of exposure and proactively manage and reduce cyber risk.
The cybersecurity industry needs to shift from traditional vulnerability management focused on giving customers a list of vulnerabilities and embrace exposure management that helps customers understand where they're exposed, what that means from a risk perspective and how they can effectively manage and reduce that risk.
The majority of security leaders now understand that the explosion of data, the increase in the number of tools used and operational silos have increased cyber risk significantly. Yet, security teams are challenged by keeping up with the adoption of new solutions to manage various vulnerabilities, web applications, identity systems and cloud assets. But the greater challenge lies in effectively analysing all the data generated from a mixed bag of technologies to make informed decisions on which exposures represent the greatest cyber risk to the organisation.
When threat actors evaluate an organisation’s cyber defences, they aren’t thinking in terms of data silos. Instead, they are looking for the right blend of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and identity privileges that will give them the greatest level of access the quickest to the organisation’s network.
To be an effective part of any exposure management program, a platform needs to offer three key features:
Comprehensive Visibility: A unified view of all assets and associated vulnerabilities (software, configuration and entitlement), whether on-premises or in the cloud, is essential to understanding where an organisation is exposed to risk. An exposure management platform needs to continuously monitor the internet to rapidly discover and identify all external-facing assets and eliminate areas of known and unknown security risk. This helps reduce the time and effort required for security teams to understand the complete attack surface, eliminate blind spots and build a baseline for effective risk management.
Prediction and Prioritisation: An exposure management platform needs to help users anticipate the consequences of a cyberattack by drawing on the large data sets available from various point tools and providing context about the relationships amongst assets, exposures, privileges and threats across an attack path. Cyber risk prioritisation is required to help cybersecurity teams continuously identify and focus on the attack pathways that present the greatest risk of being exploited. By providing accurate and predictive remediation insights, these features enable security teams to proactively reduce risk with the least amount of effort to help prevent attacks.
Effective metrics to communicate cyber risk: Security experts and business leaders require a centralised and business-aligned view of cyber risk with clear KPIs to show progress over time as well as benchmarking capabilities to compare against external peers. An exposure management platform needs to provide actionable insights into an organisation's overall cyber risk – including the value of the proactive efforts happening daily. It also requires the ability for users to be able to drill down for specifics about each department or operational unit. It needs to deliver accurate business-aligned cyber risk assessments to improve communication and collaboration among constituents. Actionable metrics enable security teams to show the value of their proactive efforts as well as save time, improve investment decisions, support cyber insurance initiatives and drive improvement over time – all while tangibly reducing risk to the organisation.
Exposure management gives cybersecurity leaders a way to reclaim the narrative from the reactive, headline-grabbing breaches and attacks. It enables them to clearly explain the effectiveness of proactive, preventive security programs in a language the business will understand. And, it transcends the limitations of outdated, siloed security programs.
