Cyber Exposure Management
Cyber Exposure management is a refined approach to managing the attack surface in today’s dynamic digital world. It combines vulnerability prioritization and remediation, mitigating controls, asset inventory and detection and response capabilities to produce a prioritized view of risk for businesses of all sizes.
Unlike traditional patch and vulnerability management programs, threat exposure management is a more proactive approach that responds to an ever-changing threat landscape by identifying risks and threats in real-time, assessing the impact of those vulnerabilities and implementing measures to mitigate them. This helps security teams focus resources on the most likely attacks, enabling them to take actions that support optimal business performance.
To start with, threat cyber exposure management needs to be implemented with the assistance of a security provider that can provide a new suite of tools and an understanding of your business. Ideally, they should also be able to integrate your existing security tools and assets so that they can be used to identify and reduce the exposures in your organization.
What is Cyber Exposure Management?
Tenable’s exposure management solution is designed to help organizations gain visibility across the modern attack surface, focus efforts to prevent likely attacks and accurately communicate cyber risk so that stakeholders can make informed decisions about their security posture. The company’s exposure management platform provides broad vulnerability coverage spanning IT assets, cloud resources, containers and web apps as well as identity systems.
Yoran notes that his company has spent more on vulnerability management-focused R&D than its two closest competitors combined. This has enabled Tenable to build differentiated capabilities, such as its Bit Discovery offering that enables customers to assess their IT environments, cloud environments, Active Directory deployments and operational technologies.
According to Purvi Garg, co-head of product engineering at Hive Pro, a threat exposure management program requires an approach that responds to an ever-changing security landscape by providing richer, more contextual insight into the risks and vulnerabilities in your environment. This helps organizations proactively identify, prioritize and manage unexpected risks or exposures that may have previously been overlooked.
Once a cybersecurity program is in place, it must be reviewed regularly to ensure that it remains up-to-date with current trends and potential vulnerabilities. This ensures that it continues to deliver value and protect your organization from future breaches.
In addition, it must be staffed by a team of experts that are dedicated to managing the program, which includes reviewing new risks and exposures as they arise, evaluating mitigation strategies and coordinating with IT to implement them in an efficient manner. This is essential to avoid wasting time and money on unneeded activities that could be better spent on more strategic initiatives.
This approach should include a strong escalation and crisis management plan. This allows your organization to immediately respond to incidents and prepare for a crisis communications strategy, which can be critical during an incident.
While many companies struggle to understand the full scope of their exposure, it is important to start by analyzing all of your digital assets. This will allow you to build a master list of all the places that your company is connected to the internet, including social media accounts, APIs, servers, networks and clouds (public, private and hybrid).
The next step in a cyber exposure management program is to determine the level of risk that these assets pose to your organization. This will require an extensive analysis of your entire infrastructure and organizational structure to determine the areas where you are most vulnerable to attacks.