How to Understand Your Attack Surface?

Abhishek Bhuyan, Senior Product Architect at Netenrich, and Matt Bromiley, SANS digital forensics and incident response instructor, recently held a webinar entitled, “Understanding Your Attack Surface with Netenrich’s Attack Surface Intelligence.” They shared insights on how traditional thinking — simply running a vulnerability scanner — no longer suffices to accurately determine an organization’s true risk set and recommended new approaches to properly examine enterprise exposure and evaluate potential risks. Understanding your attack surface requires having full visibility across all facets of your digital footprint.

In case you missed the webinar, we’ve provided a link to the on-demand version below.

Digital assets: An expanding attack surface

There is a good chance you are unaware of your entire attack surface and all that it includes. This is not a unique or small problem. Modern enterprises are growing and harnessing new technologies so quickly that it is nearly impossible to expect security teams to keep up with everything their organization is using (or no longer using).

In a world where it is possible to put a system or service in the cloud, perform a function and more digital assets become susceptible to risk and exposure. Therein lies the problem. Think for a moment about all of the assets within your organization. Are your systems physical or virtual, in hybrid cloud or on-premise? If you thought an asset is limited to only machines or systems, you are underestimating the sophistication of your attack surface.

Let’s take an example, cloud hosting solutions deliver API-based cloud assets that need to be monitored as part of the attack surface. Domains and sub-domains, DNS entries, and your corporate brand are also digital assets that must be analyzed for high risk alerts.

SANS Product Review: Attack Surface Intelligence

Netenrich helps organizations gain increased accuracy of their visibility and intelligence across their attack surface. Our Attack Surface Intelligence (ASI)* solution continuously scans for critical risk and provides threat intelligence for deeper understanding and faster resolution of incidents. Download the SANS Product Review Whitepaper: Understanding Your Attack Surface.

Understanding your attack surface with ASI

1. Discover all your digital assets: If you’re lacking complete visibility across your environments, you’re at risk for attackers may be inside your networks, performing their own reconnaissance and inventory. See what they see as your IT weaknesses and vulnerabilities. ASI offers a simple, automated method to discover and resolve issues across your digital assets.
2. Save time, gain efficiencies: ASI also analyzes your digital assets and online applications. It takes further steps to go deeper to investigate, quantify, and provide data on issues quickly. During an email, data leak, or misconfiguration investigation, security analysts are often tasked with manual analysis using their current tools. ASI actually saves analysts’ time by automating these manual lookups.
3. Risk classification: ASI gives security analysts new perspectives on securing their digital assets. Analysts are used to receiving reactive threats, which is not the case with ASI. Most of the predefined categories, such as Certificate or Misconfiguration, pose potential risks to the organization. ASI identifies these areas with alerts needing immediate attention. Analysts can click through and dig deeper into the findings.

Want to learn more? Check out our recent SANS “Understanding Your Attack Surface with Netenrich’s Attack Surface Intelligence” webinar and download our handy Threat and Attack Surface Intelligence eBook. We’ll help you improve your overall security and threat intelligence processes.

*Please note, Attack Surface Intelligence (ASI) is now known as Attack Surface Exposure (ASE). For more information, please contact us.