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Q2 ‘23 Product Release: Enhancing Visibility, Amplifying Context and Making Search Easier With AI

 

Summer is here, but the digital world isn’t taking a vacation. According to Statista, there are around 15.14 billion devices connected to the Internet – nearly double the size of the global population. As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to evolve, so does the cyberthreat landscape.

At Censys, we are committed to be the one place to understand everything on the Internet and staying at the forefront of innovation is vital to what we do. Our Q3 ‘23 Product Release is blowing in like a cool breeze on a warm July day, offering our customers enhanced visibility, deeper context, superior ease of use and the ability to harness the power of AI. These enhancements provide Censys users with more time to savor the summer while keeping a vigilant eye on the ever-changing threat landscape.

Let’s get into more detail about our releases below.

Internet Map

Comprehensive visibility into active hosts and running services is critical for security professionals, and relying on “good enough” data leaves blind spots in today’s ever-evolving threat landscape. Our multi-perspective scanning and extensive coverage of the most popular ports already provides a much more comprehensive view of the internet than other providers. However, we are excited to announce that our continued investment in maintaining the best visibility into an ever-evolving Internet has led to the release of Adaptive Port Scanning.

Adaptive Port Scanning adds intelligent targeting of running services across all 65k ports. The solution employs statistical analysis and machine learning models to predict where services are running, Increasing the scope of our scanning across the full 65k ports. This eliminates blind spots and empowers defenders with insights into critical risks hidden on obscure ports. The initial release has already uncovered millions of new hosts and services, and the impact will grow as our models learn more from the results and identify new patterns across the internet. Not only is this identifying new hosts and services, but we’re also finding entirely new ASNs that were previously obfuscated due to non-standard port usage.

 

Snapshot of all hosts running an HTTP service from February 28, 2023, The 2023 Censys State of the Internet Report

Search

Censys Search, powered by our Internet Map, enables threat hunters, incident response and security teams to accelerate investigations, locate vulnerable infrastructure, track compromised hosts, detect intrusions, improve defensive operations and more.

While the Censys Search Language allows highly customized querying of the data so that our users can find hosts that are relevant to their investigations, we recognize that not all users are experts on our Search Language. In response, we have released CensysGPT Beta to make advanced threat hunting and reconnaissance accessible to a wider range of professionals.

Harnessing the power of AI, users are able to express their search queries using natural language. As an example, if you type “Show me all the servers in Australia that have both FTP and HTTP services” into CensysGPT it will return the corresponding query. From there, you can either copy the query or click Censys Search button to have it automatically run the query for you. CensysGPT can also comprehend and respond to queries in multiple languages providing accessibility for non-English native speakers.

Censys Search users will now find it easier than ever to learn, use and discover vulnerabilities, analyze patterns and defend against threats with Censys Search.

 

 

Exposure Management

The majority of today’s internet assets are living on the cloud. Fun fact, total global data storage is projected to exceed 200 zettabytes by 2025! To have the most accurate and up-to–date Internet Map, defenders need access to an inventory that includes all internet facing exposures.

In addition to owning and managing IPs, Domains, Certificates, and Storage Buckets, organizations are also responsible for protecting their web inventory. As part of our Exposure Management solution, we unlocked a new asset type for our customers – Web Entities.

Web Entities increase visibility into an organization’s external attack surface by continually discovering and monitoring external web inventory for insecure and misconfigured websites, elasticsearch instances, kubernetes clusters and prometheus endpoints. Built on our best-in-class Internet Map, Web Entities provides comprehensive and accurate data into all Internet infrastructure and services in real-time.

 

Integrations

These days there is no shortage of security tools, which means the ability for tools to integrate is more than a convenience – it’s a necessity. Being able to integrate tools together improves efficiency and workflows, while providing a holistic view of operations supporting better strategy and decision-making. This quarter, we introduced two new integrations!

First, our updated ServiceNow ITSM Integration. This functionality gives security teams the ability to quickly operationalize threats by creating a ticket, assigning responsibility and priority and including necessary context. Teams can see ticket status directly from the Censys dashboard.

Secondly, our Splunk Integration. By integrating with this popular SIEM tool, we enable our users with a centralized location for operationalization, one click pivoting and interactive dashboards.

 

Ready to Learn More?

To learn more about our recent releases this summer, reach out to your Account Representative or request a demo today!

About the Author

Alexa Slinger
Director of Product Marketing
With over a decade of cybersecurity experience in B2B SaaS, Alexa is passionate about blending customer-centricity with technical expertise to create strategies that empower security teams.
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