PlexTrac ConceptsAttack Surface Management

To properly define attack surface management (ASM), we should start by explaining what an attack surface is. An attack surface spans the assets within your technology stack, including hardware, software, cloud (private, public, and hybrid), applications, social media, websites, networks, servers, devices, and even third-party vendors. It includes anything within your environment that an attacker could access and attempt to use as an entry point to exploit or compromise your organization and its data.

ASM is the process used to identify, monitor, and reduce vulnerabilities by creating entry barriers to prevent potential attacks. Visibility into attack vectors and paths helps security teams proactively mitigate risks, defend against the latest threats, and strengthen their security posture.

Effective attack surface management (ASM) involves processes and solutions to help you manage vulnerabilities, perform regular testing, automate threat detection and response, and keep up-to-date on the latest indicators of compromise (IOCs).

ASM typically includes the following:

• Discovery: Conducting scans, reviewing logs, and identifying known and unknown assets, such as unmanaged or unauthorized devices, that could be accessed by a malicious actor.
• Classification: Contextualizing assets and vulnerabilities by type, importance, and level of risk to the overall business if exploited.
• Assessment: Evaluating and regularly testing assets for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance to ensure they are properly secured. You can perform different tests including dynamic application security testing (DAST), static application security testing (SAST), or application penetration testing.
• Prioritization: Ranking vulnerabilities and assets according to likelihood of exploitation, difficulty to remediate, potential business impact, and other factors.
• Remediation: Fixing vulnerabilities, patching and updating software, configuring firewalls, and implementing necessary security controls for threat remediation based on prioritization.

ASM essentially opens up a black box in cybersecurity. It gives you visibility, context, and the ability to prioritize your IT assets to address vulnerabilities before exploitation. ASM also provides insights into security gaps across your attack surface.

To gain further visibility and context to prevent exploitation, you can leverage vulnerability scanning and penetration testing to pinpoint vulnerabilities, mitigate shadow IT risks, improve incident response, and meet compliance requirements.

Remote work, decentralized networks, and constant changes in the IT ecosystem can make it challenging to map your attack surface accurately, limiting your visibility across your infrastructure. Additionally, traditional asset inventories may be slow, manual, and infrequent which could lead to inaccurate inventories and security gaps. Similarly, vulnerability scanners that only check for known assets can lead to missed context and major issues for security operations (SecOps) and threat detection teams.

When evaluating ASM solutions ensure the tool integrates with your existing systems, can handle your volume of data, and adapts to the latest exploits to avoid any challenges with attack surface management.

PlexTrac enables security teams to bring data from all vulnerability scanners, outsourced engagements, and security assessments into one platform.

Streamline your exposure assessment by continuously identifying and prioritizing risks to remediate critical vulnerabilities and strengthen security posture proactively with PlexTrac. Request your demo today to learn more.