As businesses scale, the number of employees, assets, and platforms continuously expand, giving adversaries many pathways to gain entry to networks and environments. To mitigate risks as the world becomes increasingly connected, prioritizing attack surface reduction is critical.
Attack surface management (ASM) results in attack surface reduction because it identifies unknown or vulnerable parts of an attack surface allowing security teams to address these risks. Attack surface reduction, when aligned with business needs, decreases opportunities for threat actors to find and exploit an unmanaged or weak asset while enabling the business to grow securely.
Gain a Shared Understanding of Assets versus Exposures
According to Forrester, attack surface management is defined as, “the process of continuously discovering, identifying, inventorying, and assessing the exposures of an entity’s IT asset estate.” Recognizing the difference between assets and exposures is an important part of ASM security.
Assets include IP addresses, domains, ASNs, and cloud accounts. When assets are unmanaged or unknown, they are a more susceptible target and at a higher risk for vulnerabilities.
Exposures are risks that exist on assets and can also pose a cybersecurity risk for organizations. Exposures include open ports, SSL certificates, and vulnerabilities.
The Difference Between Known versus Unknown Assets
As businesses grow and adapt to change, their attack surface grows as well. Without proper asset tracking, this can increase the number of unknown external assets.
Understanding the difference between known versus unknown assets, also sometimes referred to as managed versus unmanaged assets, can improve attack surface reduction. Known assets i ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
