Game over for vulnerabilities! With exposure management, no hiding place is safe. The threat landscape is becoming increasingly complex - and traditional security approaches have long since reached their limits. Exposure management provides clarity here by making all vulnerabilities, risks and attack vectors visible in a holistic manner and placing them in a meaningful context. This allows cybersecurity teams to regain control and prioritize threats before they become a real risk.
On the confusing paths of the sometimes unpredictable threat landscape, cybersecurity teams are now dealing with increasingly complex IT infrastructures, multi-layered security incidents and new, innovative attack vectors on companies of different sizes and industries.
Detecting and managing these threats has become a significant and growing challenge in everyday cybersecurity operations. Effective attack surface management therefore requires a central overview of the entire attack surface - in other words, a dashboard on which all vulnerabilities, risks and potential gateways are recorded, linked and presented in a comprehensible manner.
This is exactly where our Attack Surface Management (ASM) solution comes into play: it combines the scanning of external attack surfaces with internal asset context, from endpoints to the cloud, and provides you with a holistic view of your company's attack surface - for effective exposure management. This allows you to see and understand potential risks and benefit from a single source of truth for all teams. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Let's take a closer look!
Instead of isolated security measures that often only address individual threats, Exposure Management (EM) brings everything onto a central platform - for full transparency and control. All attack vectors within a company network are recorded, correlated and managed holistically on a dashboard. This allows vulnerabilities to be identified in real time and threats to be fended off before they are exploited.
All of a company's digital and physical assets - from servers and cloud services to end devices and user behaviour - are included for effective detection, evaluation, prioritization, focusing and mitigation.
| Attack surface management in exposure management | |||
| Scan & Expose | Evaluate & Enrich | Prioritize & Focus | Mitigate & Defend |
| 360° scan and identification of risks | Risk assessment in context and analysis in real time | Focusing on important risks by risk score | Systematically minimize and avoid risks |
Table: The 4 pillars of attack surface management in exposure management.
Data enrichment refers to the enrichment of existing data records with external or internal data sources. In IT security, data enrichment is a process in which security event data is combined with additional event and context information in order to more easily transform raw data into meaningful and actionable findings.
Individual incidents or alerts are like a handful of puzzle pieces without knowing what the complete picture looks like. They can reveal part of the threat, but often lack the details needed to understand the full extent of the threat. This is where the power of context-based data enrichment comes into play. By enriching raw data with contextual insights from internal and external sources, it has much more information - and can be processed and mitigated by our analysts in a much more targeted and efficient way.
These include IT asset management, Active Directory and vulnerability management systems for managing and analyzing IT resources and vulnerabilities.
Security platforms such as SIEM and EDR/XDR help to detect threats in real time, while Dark Web Monitoring and Attack Surface Management (ASM) uncover external risks. In production and manufacturing environments, IoT/OT security platforms provide important monitoring data for networked devices and industrial control systems. Security awareness training also contributes to risk assessment by providing insights into users' security awareness and behavior.
Our holistic exposure management not only analyzes vulnerabilities, but also creates an end-to-end security strategy in which valuable insights from different sources are brought together and linked to obtain even more precise results for an even more targeted response. This includes the consideration of all risks from different data sources - contextualized, in real time, centrally managed, all on one platform.
Effective exposure management comprises several key elements that work together to create a comprehensive safety net:
With our 360° exposure management platform, we effortlessly bring together cloud and on-premise assessments with valuable data from your IT, security and business systems. This allows you to stay in control of your attack surface at all times and detect, prioritize and mitigate risks at an early stage. Our fully integrated solution gives your security team the visibility it needs - and provides you with the ideal support to strengthen your cyber resilience.
With Attack Surface Management, we pursue three clear objectives:
In both Exposure Management (EM) and Vulnerability Management (VM), our aim is to keep an eye on the risks of an IT infrastructure and to strengthen IT security in the long term. Nevertheless, both approaches use different methods and cover different areas and security gaps.
Vulnerability management takes a very targeted approach and focuses primarily on identifying vulnerabilities within systems and applications. The aim is to find specific gaps that attackers could exploit - such as insecure applications or missing security updates.
Exposure management looks at a company's entire attack surface and analyzes both external and internal risks in context. In contrast to traditional vulnerability scans, which often only identify individual risks, Exposure Management also considers invisible threats such as shadow IT, unsecured cloud resources or insecure user behavior.
A particularly important component of the Exposure Management solution is the enrichment of context-related information (data & context enrichment) from various sources. This provides you with comprehensive information on potential threats and allows you to prioritize and focus on them using a risk score.
Nevertheless, vulnerability management plays a key role in attack surface management, as the insights gained contribute significantly to the optimization of exposure management. This gives SOC teams deeper insights that complement, optimize and facilitate their work in a targeted manner.
All the benefits of exposure management at a glance:
Continuous identification of security gaps - such as missing endpoint agents or insufficient multi-factor authentication (MFA) - gives you a clear overview of vulnerable resources and identities. At the same time, you empower your employees by defining clear responsibilities for remediation and providing your incident response team with the information they need to prioritize threats effectively. With Exposure Management, you can also identify shadow IT, manage IT resources efficiently and enhance your CMDB (Configuration Management Database) tools with in-depth insights into asset activities and lifecycle management.
In an increasingly networked world with ever more complex cyber threats, Attack Surface Management (ASM) as part of Exposure Management (EM) is the key to a proactive security strategy. It enables you to identify risks at an early stage, manage security measures in a targeted manner and meet all compliance requirements at the same time. A well-implemented EM program helps to close security gaps, minimize attack surfaces and deploy cybersecurity resources efficiently - for more protection, better compliance and sustainable IT security.
Use detailed contextual information to stay one step ahead of attackers. Eliminate security gaps, improve your compliance and correct misconfigurations in hybrid IT environments. Contact us - we will be happy to advise you and answer all your questions!
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