How to Respond to Critical Threats with Attack Surface Management

A 2023 survey of over 2,000 Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts revealed some worrying realities about the state of organizational cybersecurity. 63% of analysts said that the size of their organization’s “attack surface” has increased over the past three years. Furthermore, SOC teams are unable to deal with over two-thirds (67%) of daily alerts, causing 97% of analysts to worry that they may miss a relevant security event that puts their organization at risk.1 Together, all these numbers and facts translate into what the report calls “a perfect storm of an ever-expanding attack surface”.

Fortunately, there is a way to minimize the attack surface and protect organizations from the near-constant risk of cyberattacks and data breaches: attack surface management (ASM). ASM solutions empower organizations to continuously discover exposed assets and associated vulnerabilities across the attack surface and prioritize these for mitigation to minimize the potential for an attack.

The Expanding Attack Surface and its Implications

Organizations’ attack surfaces are full of possible entry points or “attack vectors” that may allow an unauthorized or malicious user to exploit a vulnerability to carry out a cyberattack, access company systems, or exfiltrate data. The enterprise attack surface can often house critical threats that would result in root-level compromise of servers or infrastructure if exploited, making it extremely important for them to prioritize vulnerabilities and risks. The more expansive an organization’s attack surface is, the more exposed it is to potential threats.

Many organizations’ attack surfaces are getting larger and becoming more complex, with several factors leading to the expansion, including:

1. Increasing adoption of cloud services that rely on the Internet for connectivity and can conceivably be accessed from any location or device
2. A growing willingness of leaders to adopt remote or hybrid work models, which allows many people to access organizational assets from outside the network security perimeter
3. Expanding IT environments
4. Increasing numbers of network connections and interactions
5. Poor security hygiene and awareness
6. Software development processes that focus more on competitive development speed while often sacrificing software security
7. Expanding supply chains with an increasing number of third-party risks

The larger an organization’s attack surface is, the more attack vectors it contains, which leads to a higher risk of security incidents like viruses, malware and ransomware attacks, DDoS attacks, supply chain attacks, and data breaches.

Hardening the Attack Surface

Gartner advises security leaders to “continuously monitor (their) hybrid digital environments to enable early identification and optimal prioritization of vulnerabilities to help maintain a hardened attack surface”.3 A hardened attack surface is a reduced attack surface.

A reduced attack surface will have fewer attack vectors and exposures such as compromised passwords, unpatched operating systems, vulnerable software, misconfiguration errors, obsolete applications, and so on. Organizations can eliminate many of these potential vulnerabilities and harden their attack surface by implementing an attack surface management solution.

Attack surface management coupled with advanced technology such as AI/ML can enable security teams with rich context and evidence to better understand critical information associated with exposed assets such as:

1. How an adversary could perpetrate an attack
2. Which assets are most vulnerable to exploitation
3. Which vulnerabilities should be prioritized for remediation based on actual risk determined by attractiveness, potential impact of a breach, and ease of exploitation from an attacker’s perspective
4. Which security measures should be implemented to address these weaknesses before attackers can discover and exploit them

By leveraging ASM solutions, organizations can discover, prioritize, and mitigate exposures and critical attacker entry points to reduce the risk of attack. ASM is also a useful cybersecurity approach to identify and mitigate ubiquitous or emergent threats if used alongside AI technology which can uncover behavioral patterns and anomalies not normally found with manual testing methods.

ASM and Identifying Ubiquitous and Emergent Threats

In December 2021, a critical vulnerability “Log4Shell” was discovered in the popular logging tool Log4j. The vulnerability, if left unchecked, can allow hackers – even those with very little expertise – to:

1. break into target systems
2. steal users’ login credentials (and even their real names)
3. exfiltrate sensitive or confidential data
4. infect networks and devices with malware
5. take control of a targeted system for ransom

The chances of some or all of the above happening in the real world are very high because Log4j is used by a large number of software, apps, cloud services, games, and even security tools and software development tools. Since Log4j is a critical component of the software supply chain, its Log4Shell vulnerability can potentially affect millions of computers and users.

An effective ASM solution enables early and proactive identification of ubiquitous or newly discovered vulnerabilities like Log4Shell. The earlier a critical vulnerability or threat is identified, the faster it can be mitigated to weaken its ability to wreak damage.

Attack Surface Management Challenges

1. Asset Discoverability: Asset discoverability is one of the key challenges of ASM. To discover the attack surface and understand the risks within it, it’s important to discover, inventory, classify, and monitor vulnerable assets. But as we have already seen, attack surfaces are expanding rapidly and increasing in complexity, so it can be hard to maintain full visibility into all the devices, applications, databases, and cloud services that are part of the organization’s tech stack (and attack surface) when not done continuously.
2. Context: ASM without context is simply a list of vulnerabilities. With deep contextual insights, enterprises can understand the criticality of the exposure, its impact or actual risk, and implement effective risk-based prioritization and remediation efforts. Without context, it’s nearly impossible to do either.
3. Continuity: Outdated or manual ASM solutions are not very effective at reducing the attack surface. Since new zero-day vulnerabilities, for example, are being discovered virtually every day, it is important to implement an automated security testing and validation solution on a continuous basis.

Mitigating Attack Surface Management Challenges with BreachLock

BreachLock’s advanced ASM solution identifies exposed assets and associated potential attacker entry points and prioritizes these exposures based on criticality, potential impact to the organization, and risk tolerance. Moreover, by using ASM with other offensive security methodologies, we are seeing improved outcomes for customers.

BreachLock also offers flexible and versatile solutions for continuous attack surface discovery including Pentesting as a Service (PTaaS), and automated pentesting and red teaming with evidence-based results integrated into the Breachlock platform. To learn how BreachLock can help you, please schedule a free discovery call with our experts.

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. 2023 State of Threat Detection, Vectra Threat Labs
2. Gartner Identifies the Top Cybersecurity Trends for 2024