As cybersecurity technology has become more sophisticated, so have threat actors and the tactics used to take advantage of digital weaknesses. The evolution of workplace structures and environments has complicated and magnified the need for advanced cybersecurity protocols.
Meanwhile, external attack surfaces are growing and exposing organizations to a myriad of privacy and data risks. Searching through your attack surface, identifying vulnerabilities, prioritizing them, and resolving them can take extensive amounts of time without the right solution in place. Let’s explore how attack surface management (ASM) saves your team time and gives you the greatest visibility of your assets possible, protecting your organization from cyber threats.
How does ASM save you time?
For 43% of organizations, attack surface discovery takes over 80 hours of work. And still, less than 10% of companies believe they actively monitor their complete attack surface. Using ASM cuts down significantly on not only the discovery process time, but also the time it takes to perform ongoing attack surface management.
Visibility through continuous asset discovery
An astounding 69% of organizations have experienced some type of cyberattack in which the attack itself started through the exploit of an unknown or unmanaged internet-facing asset.
Because ASM is an emerging solution, most companies take it upon themselves to perform asset discovery using various homemade tooling that limits scope, speed, and accuracy of data. This rudimentary approach then has to be managed and maintained by someone on your team who likely has a laundry list of other tasks that need to be done as well — the majority of them taking priority. The end result is an incomplete process that is performed on an infrequent basis and allows for these unmanaged and unknown assets to persist.
Attack surface management solutions are designed specifically to fix this issue. By canvasing the entire Internet and intelligently drawing connections from what you know about to things you may not have your eyes on, an ASM solution will help you keep track of everything you own. And all of this is automated to happen on a daily basis. By becoming aware of all assets faster than ever before, IT teams can substantially shrink the time it takes to resolve and prepare for potential threats.
Risk prioritization
Vulnerability management tools are often the foundation for anything risk-related, and they provide deep insights around the assets you know about once they have been scanned. However, this is only giving you an internal point of view of your risk posture. Plus, these scans can be resource-intensive and put a strain on your environment, meaning it’s unlikely they are being run as frequently as the cybersecurity landscape is changing.
A sophisticated ASM solution will not only identify your entire Internet-facing footprint, but will also provide daily updates on what risks can be seen from the outside (aka where the attackers are looking for weaknesses). And this shouldn’t just include software vulnerabilities and CVEs. Misconfigured storage objects, unencrypted login pages, exposed Kubernetes dashboards, and much more should be part of the risk framework an ASM leverages.
On top of all this, these issues should be prioritized based on impact, exploitability, likelihood, and what is important to your team right now. This can save teams substantial time organizing risk priorities on their own and empowers IT professionals to get right to work resolving issues before it’s too late.
Purposeful integrations
If an attack surface management solution does not have the power to gather information from every environment, it is not the timesaver it should be. Without insight into every area, teams will still have to go into each one to collect attack surface discovery and visibility data. The most effective ASM will save IT teams time by integrating seamlessly into every element of their operations, pulling together and organizing data from each cloud environment, website, application, and corner of the internet.
Powerful remediation
By significantly reducing the time it takes to collect attack surface data, identify potential weaknesses, rank their priority, and develop a plan to resolve them, teams have everything they need to eliminate any threats — much faster than ever before. Powerful attack surface management technology gathers all of these resources in one centralized location and provides remediation opportunities and plans to move forward with confidence.
Censys’ ASM solution
Censys Attack Surface Management (ASM) takes the guesswork out of understanding and protecting an organization’s digital footprint. By providing a comprehensive profile of the IT assets on the internet, we empower security teams with the visibility into their attack surface and the insights they need to protect themselves, to stay ahead of attackers, and to build more secure solutions. Censys ASM considerably shrinks the time it takes for IT professionals to:
- Search the entire internet for known and unknown assets
- Identify vulnerabilities
- Prioritize risks
- Devise plans for remediation
With much less time required to achieve each of the tasks above, IT teams have more time to allocate for actually resolving cybersecurity threats. By empowering in-house professionals to get ahead of potential vulnerabilities, it allows them to be proactive about threat detection, rather than scrambling to patch up after a breach has taken place.
Take on remediation with Censys Attack Surface Management
With all of the changes happening to the attack surface, it never feels like there is enough time to effectively identify and remediate every vulnerability. With Censys ASM, IT teams are given their time back; rather than spending hundreds of hours on attack surface discovery before even addressing potential threats, professionals can easily prioritize issues and dive into remediation with confidence.
Ready to see what your attack surface looks like in real-time?
