How to Secure Your Expanding (and Hidden) Cybersecurity Ecosystem

Your organization’s cybersecurity ecosystem is complex. It covers a wide range of internal digital assets but also extends beyond the network perimeter to other entities, such as vendors, suppliers, and cloud service providers—making you increasingly vulnerable to cyber risk. 

To secure this ecosystem, you need both an outside-in and inside-out perspective of vulnerabilities and risks.

Let’s look at how you can achieve broad and continuous visibility into all assets in your cybersecurity ecosystem.

1. Understand your digital footprint

Because you can’t secure what you can’t see, you must first discover and validate your digital footprint. Without that visibility it’s impossible to prioritize risk remediation and may lead to resources being allocated to lower priority defensive strategies.

Use Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics to gain visibility into digital assets across your cybersecurity ecosystem—even beyond your network perimeter. You’ll get dashboard views into each asset, broken down by cloud provider, geography, business unit, and subsidiaries. You’ll be automatically alerted to areas of concentrated risk or highest exposure for rapid remediation. Think of it as seeing your cybersecurity ecosystem the way a hacker does.

Take a look at how Bitsight customer BearingPoint uses Attack Surface Analytics to get an instant visual of its global digital footprint to better understand where its data and client data is located and maintain compliance with regulations, such as GDPR.

2. Continuously monitor for emerging risk

Threat actors are always adapting their techniques and targeting emerging vulnerabilities. You need to move with the same agility.

Rather than wait for an annual security assessment or penetration test, use continuous monitoring technology to automatically scan your entire cybersecurity ecosystem for risks. For instance, Bitsight continuously monitors your cybersecurity posture and provides automated insights and near real-time alerts the moment risks are detected—such as insecure ports, misconfigured or unpatched systems, and even anomalous user behavior. With this insight, you can fix immediate exposure concerns—and watch for new ones. You can also track your security rating to see how your security performance improves over time. 

Bitsight even lets you quantify your financial exposure should risk go unaddressed, so you can prioritize time, resources, and budget to what matters most.

3. Assess third-party risk—across the vendor lifecycle

Third-party vendors are essential to your business, but they also pose a cyber risk. Supply chain attacks are now the most popular method used by threat actors. Consider the statistics:

• 62 percent of network intrusions originate from third parties, often from someone in your software supply chain 
• 73 percent of organizations have experienced at least one significant disruption from a third-party in the last three years 

With more vendors entering your supply chain, you need a way to understand risks in your extended cybersecurity ecosystem. But when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of vendors, many of whom handle sensitive data, gaining insight into third-party risk can be overwhelming. Security questionnaires have their place, but they only provide a point-in-time snapshot of third-party risks and are hard to scale across your vendor portfolio.

With Bitsight, you gain immediate visibility into a vendor’s security posture and any hidden risk in their interconnected cybersecurity ecosystem—including their suppliers. Use Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) across the vendor lifecycle:

• During onboarding: Validate responses to security questionnaires with objective, data-driven insights into cyber risk. Bitsight TPRM provides near real-time visibility into a vendor’s security posture based on objective data into previous cybersecurity incidents, vulnerabilities in their networks, and risky fourth-party connections.
• During the contract term: Confidently uncover emerging cyber risks with continuous third-party monitoring. Bitsight automatically monitors your vendors’ cybersecurity ecosystems and notifies you when a new vulnerability is detected or a vendor’s security posture falls below pre-agreed thresholds or SLAs.
• During major security events: When a major security event occurs, like SolarWinds or Log4j, Bitsight Third-Party Vulnerability Detection, part of Bitsight TPRM, makes it easier for you to assess the impact across your third-party supply chain. Within a single dashboard, you can detect when a new zero-day vulnerability affects your vendors, quickly initiate and prioritize vendor outreach, track responses, and build stronger vendor relationships through trusted collaboration. Read more.

Bitsight also automates complex vendor risk management tasks across this lifecycle at scale. With Bitsight Vendor Risk Management you can automate critical tasks and workflows—from due diligence and onboarding to reassessment and ongoing monitoring.

A proven way to secure your cybersecurity ecosystem

Bitsight delivers unparalleled visibility into your cybersecurity ecosystem. It enables you to understand its scope, continuously monitor internal and third-party risks, and prioritize remediation efforts where they can have the most impact.  

Learn how visionary organizations, including NASA, Aveva, Brewin Dolphin, Cornerstone Building Brands, and leading universities use Bitsight solutions to gain both an inside-out and outside-in view of their cybersecurity ecosystem.