Attack Surface Management | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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 adoption dramatically increasing the ease of exposing new systems and services to the internet, prioritizing threats and managing your attack surface from an attacker's perspective has never been more important. In this guide, we look at why attack surfaces are growing and how to monitor and manage them properly with  tools like Intruder . Let's dive in. What is your attack surface? First, it's important to understand what we mean when we talk about an attack surface. An attack surface is the sum of your digital assets that are 'reachable' by an attacker – whether they are secure or vulnerable, known or unknown, in active use or not. You can also have both internal and external attack surfaces - imagine for example a malicious email attachment landing in a colleague's inbox, vs a new FTP server being...

Many businesses rely on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to assess the severity of vulnerabilities for prioritization. While these scores provide some insight into the potential impact of a vulnerability, they don't factor in real-world threat data, such as the likelihood of exploitation. With new vulnerabilities discovered daily, teams don't have the time - or the budget - to waste on fixing vulnerabilities that won't actually reduce risk. Read on to learn more about how CVSS and EPSS compare and why using EPSS is a game changer for your vulnerability prioritization process.  What is vulnerability prioritization? Vulnerability prioritization is the process of evaluating and ranking vulnerabilities based on the potential impact they could have on an organization. The goal is to help security teams determine which vulnerabilities should be addressed, in what timeframe, or if they need to be fixed at all. This process ensures that the most critical risks are mitigat...

In cybersecurity, confidence is a double-edged sword. Organizations often operate under a false sense of security , believing that patched vulnerabilities, up-to-date tools, polished dashboards, and glowing risk scores guarantee safety. The reality is a bit of a different story. In the real world, checking the right boxes doesn't equal being secure. As Sun Tzu warned, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Two and a half millennia later, the concept still holds: your organization's cybersecurity defenses must be strategically validated under real-world conditions to ensure your business's very survival. Today, more than ever, you need Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) , the essential strategy that's still missing from most security frameworks. The Danger of False Confidence Conventional wisdom suggests that if you've patched known bugs, deployed a stack of well-regarded security tools, and passed the nec...

Read the full article for key points from Intruder's VP of Product, Andy Hornegold's recent talk on exposure management. If you'd like to hear Andy's insights first-hand,  watch Intruder's on-demand webinar . To learn more about reducing your attack surface , reach out to their team today.   Attack surface management vs exposure management Attack surface management (ASM) is the ongoing process of discovering and identifying assets that can be seen by an attacker on the internet, showing where security gaps exist, where they can be used to perform an attack, and where defenses are strong enough to repel an attack. If there's something on the internet that can be exploited by an attacker, it typically falls under the realm of attack surface management. Exposure management takes this a step further to include data assets, user identities, and cloud account configuration. It can be summarized as the set of processes that allow organizations to continually and consistently eval...

What is Continuous Attack Surface Penetration Testing or CASPT? Continuous Penetration Testing or Continuous Attack Surface Penetration Testing (CASPT) is an advanced security practice that involves the continuous, automated, and ongoing penetration testing services of an organization's digital assets to identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities. CASPT is designed for enterprises with an evolving attack surface where periodic pentesting is no longer sufficient. Unlike traditional penetration testing, which is often performed annually or semi-annually, CASPT is an ongoing process that integrates directly into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), ensuring that vulnerabilities are discovered and addressed in real-time or near-real-time. CASPT is a proactive security measure designed to stay ahead of potential attackers by continuously evaluating the security posture of an organization. It enables security teams to identify critical entry points that could be exploited b...

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...

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? C...

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...