Attack Surface Management | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Attack surface management (ASM) and vulnerability management (VM) are often confused, and while they overlap, they're not the same. The main difference between attack surface management and vulnerability management is in their scope: vulnerability management checks a list of known assets, while attack surface management assumes you have unknown assets and so begins with discovery. Let's look at both in more detail. What is vulnerability management? Vulnerability management is, at the simplest level, the use of automated tools to identify, prioritize and report on security issues and vulnerabilities in your digital infrastructure. Vulnerability management uses automated scanners to run regular, scheduled scans on assets within a known IP range to detect established and new vulnerabilities, so you can apply patches, remove vulnerabilities or mitigate any potential risks. These vulnerabilities tend to use a risk score or scale – such as CVSS – and risk calculations. Vulnerability sca

Attack surfaces are growing faster than security teams can keep up. To stay ahead, you need to know what's exposed and where attackers are most likely to strike. With cloud migration dramatically increasing the number of internal and external targets, prioritizing threats and managing your attack surface from an attacker's perspective has never been more important. Let's look at why it's growing, and how to monitor and manage it properly with tools like  Intruder . What is your attack surface? First, it's important to understand that your attack surface is the sum of your digital assets that are 'exposed' – whether the digital assets are secure or vulnerable, known or unknown, in active use or not. This attack surface changes continuously over time, and includes digital assets that are on-premises, in the cloud, in subsidiary networks, and in third-party environments. In short, it's anything that a hacker can attack.  What is attack surface managemen

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

The hype around different security categories can make it difficult to discern features and capabilities from bias when researching new platforms. You want to advance your security measures, but what steps actually make sense for your business? For anyone ready to find an  attack surface management (ASM) vendor , review these six questions before getting started to understand the key features to look for in an ASM platform and the qualities of the vendor who supports it. Refer to these as your quick guide for interviewing vendors to walk away with the most suitable ASM platform for your needs.  Checklist: 6 Questions to Ask Attack Surface Management Vendors  Does your platform have the capability to discover the unknown?  How do you prevent alert fatigue, prioritize alerts and remove false positives?  Can you track attack surface changes over time?  How do you plan to evolve the platform going forward? What services related to ASM do you offer? Can we demo or test run the pl

As the business environment becomes increasingly connected, organizations' attack surfaces continue to expand, making it challenging to map and secure both known and unknown assets. In particular, unknown assets present security challenges related to shadow IT, misconfigurations, ineffective scan coverage, among others. Given attack surface sprawl and evolving threats, many organizations are embracing  attack surface management (ASM)  tools to discover and address critical exposures. Asset discovery is an important capability to have, and one that's helping to drive the adoption of attack surface management tools and services. That said, asset discovery is only one aspect of effective attack surface management. Making the attack surface as impenetrable as possible takes offensive security that goes far beyond the discovery phase. Why Asset Discovery Isn't Enough  Given the complexity and ever-expanding scale of the digital infrastructure at most companies, cataloging all the known

The term " attack surface management " (ASM) went from unknown to ubiquitous in the cybersecurity space over the past few years. Gartner and Forrester have both highlighted the  importance of ASM  recently, multiple solution providers have emerged in the space, and investment and acquisition activity have seen an uptick. Many concepts come and go in cybersecurity, but attack surface management promises to have staying power. As it evolves into a critical component of threat and exposure management strategies, it's worth examining why attack surface management has grown to become a key category, and why it will continue to be a necessity for organizations worldwide. What is Attack Surface Management?  Attack surfaces are rapidly expanding. The attack surface includes any IT asset connected to the internet – applications, IoT devices, Kubernetes clusters, cloud platforms – that threat actors could infiltrate and exploit to perpetuate an attack. A company's attack surface fa

Digitalization initiatives are connecting once-isolated Operational Technology (OT) environments with their Information Technology (IT) counterparts. This digital transformation of the factory floor has accelerated the connection of machinery to digital systems and data. Computer systems for managing and monitoring digital systems and data have been added to the hardware and software used for managing and monitoring industrial devices and machines, connecting OT to IT. Such connectivity enhances productivity, reduces operational costs and speeds up processes. However, this convergence has also increased organizations' security risk, making manufacturers more susceptible to attacks. In fact, in 2022 alone, there were 2,337 security breaches of manufacturing systems, 338 with confirmed data disclosure (Verizon, 2022 DBIR Report).  Ransomware: A Growing Threat for Manufacturers The nature of attacks has also changed. In the past, attackers may have been espionage-driven, targeting

According to Forrester, External Attack Surface Management (EASM) emerged as a market category in 2021 and gained popularity in 2022. In a different report, Gartner concluded that vulnerability management vendors are expanding their offerings to include  Attack Surface Management (ASM)  for a suite of comprehensive offensive security solutions. Recognition from global analysts has officially put ASM on the map, evolving the way security leaders approach their cybersecurity.  Why Now is the Right Time for Attack Surface Management  Businesses today rely more on digital assets than ever before. Shifts over time include more use of the cloud, an increase in remote workforces, and greater expansion of digital assets in part because of mergers and acquisitions. This resulted in an expansion of both known and unknown attack surfaces that businesses manage, presenting a greater number of pathways for malicious actors to gain entry to an environment.  Consider this analogy for example: I

The wide-ranging adoption of cloud facilities and the subsequent mushrooming of organizations' networks, combined with the recent migration to remote work, had the direct consequence of a massive expansion of organizations' attack surface and led to a growing number of blind spots in connected architectures. The unforeseen  results of this expanded and attack surface  with fragmented monitoring has been a marked increase in the number of successful cyber-attacks, most notoriously, ransomware, but covering a range of other types of attacks as well. The main issues are unmonitored blind spots used by cyber-attackers to breach organizations' infrastructure and escalate their attack or move laterally, seeking valuable information.  The problem lies in discovery. Most organizations have evolved faster than their ability to keep track of all the moving parts involved and to catch up to catalog all past and present assets is often viewed as a complex and resource-heavy task wit