Prioritizing Critical Third-Party Assets to Protect Your Extended Attack Surface

The enterprise attack surface now extends well beyond the network firewall. As a result, Third Party Risk Management Teams are increasingly becoming an extension of Security Operations Centers, responding in times of crisis to questions of who, what, and more urgently, how and when. The line between ‘their exposure’ and ‘our risk’ is almost non-existent.

But bridging the gap between data and platforms can be challenging. In many cases, even the tools and systems that look at 1st party exposure are different from those that monitor 3rd and 4th party vulnerabilities (if they exist at all).

Our latest Continuous Monitoring enhancement - Critical Asset Management - is a result of direct customer feedback asking to help bridge this gap. It’s the next step on our journey to provide a unified view of the attack surface, furthering visibility into the most critical third-party IPs and domains alongside your view of your own network and externally facing infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

• As the attack surface expands, third-party risk teams need the capability to drill down into the specific risks at the intersection of their business and vendors.
• Bitsight’s new Critical Asset Management enhancement makes it easy to target specific third-party assets for continuous monitoring–individually or in bulk.
• Prioritized monitoring ensures that an organization’s limited security resources are focused on the assets with the greatest impact on third-party risk posture.
• Critical Asset Management is now available to all Bitsight CM customers at no additional cost.
• Via the Bitsight EASM module, third-party critical assets become visible to the Security Operations team, enabling collaboration and transparency.

Identifying the most critical third-party risk with an asset-level approach

As organizations strengthen internal exposure management, the extended attack surface—shaped by their vendor ecosystem—demands a more precise, "focus-on-what-matters-most" approach. Rather than assessing vendors' overall exposure and risk, third-party risk teams can zero in on the most critical intersections—the specific services vendors provide, represented by key IPs and domains. This targeted approach improves prioritization and is especially valuable in time-sensitive situations, such as responding to zero-day vulnerabilities. By monitoring vendors at the asset level, teams can act faster on risks that directly impact their organization, ensuring resources are allocated where they matter most—without treating all vendor assets equally.

This refined approach moves beyond general vendor monitoring, enabling security teams to prioritize investigations and drive urgency where it matters most. Instead of treating all vendor assets equally, they can focus on the most relevant relationships, improving visibility, streamlining communication, and making risk management more actionable—without adding unnecessary noise.

When it comes to prioritizing your critical third-party assets, this will be based on a variety of factors. For example, third-party vendors generally have varying levels of strategic importance or potential risk. After all, an ecommerce vendor that your company buys office supplies from does not pose the same level of risk as a strategic technology integration partner that provides behind-the-scenes functionality for one of your customer-facing applications. So, while both third-party risk vectors should be identified and understood, the level of ongoing focus on each should not be the same.

The same may be true within a specific vendor’s asset inventory. Vendor assets that have a more direct touch point with your business and IT infrastructure warrant a higher level of focus as part of your third-party risk management strategy.

Prioritizing third-party asset management for maximum impact on risk

Critical Asset Management is a new addition to Bitsight Continuous Monitoring that gives customers the ability to target specific third-party assets for continuous monitoring. This makes it easier for security teams to focus their efforts where they can have the greatest impact on their third-party risk posture.

Selecting critical assets for monitoring

When a critical third-party asset is identified, it can be added to continuous monitoring with just a few clicks. Simply navigate to the Infrastructure Assets page for a specific vendor, select one or more of the assets displayed, and click Monitor Assets to enroll them in monitoring.

Selecting monitored assets in batches

There may also be cases where you would like to add third-party assets to continuous monitoring in batches. Critical Asset Management includes a simple workflow for this as well. You can kick this process off by uploading a CSV file containing specific assets and the companies they are associated with. Bitsight will cross-reference the provided list with its inventory of tracked assets and provide a summary of matches. From there, matched assets can be added to monitoring with a single button click.

Viewing monitored third-party assets

Once you have a collection of critical third-party assets enrolled in monitoring, it’s also very easy to revisit them and make adjustments. You can do this by navigating to the Critical Assets page under the Portfolio Risk menu. From there, you can view and make changes to monitored assets across all of your third-party relationships from a unified view.

Bridging Asset and Vendor Risk

Criticality isn’t just about direct connections; it’s also about the broader exposure landscape. Bitsight’s exposure workflows reveal vendor assets that may be vulnerable or exposed to active threats, even if they don’t directly interface with your systems. By layering this insight with an understanding of your vendor’s strategic importance, you can prioritize monitoring and mitigation efforts during major security events, ensuring your risk management program remains both comprehensive and efficient.

On the Critical Assets Exposure page, Critical vendor assets contribute to your view of the vulnerability concentration graph. The additional drill-down menu provides a new detailed sheet for a deeper dive.

Managing extended attack surface that goes beyond traditional cybersecurity asset management

As mentioned in the beginning, the emerging need we’ve been hearing from customers is that risk leaders and practitioners like you are looking to bridge the info and workflow gaps so you can collaborate on managing risk across your own infrastructure and vendor ecosystem.

Bitsight simplified and streamlined this by introducing a Third Party Assets view under the Attack Surface module, available to all Security Operations users who access External Attack Surface Management module in Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) product. With this view, security teams can assess third-party assets just as they do their own, enabling better visibility, risk prioritization, and collaboration across first and third-party attack surfaces.

Getting started with Critical Asset Management

Critical Asset Management is now available to all Bitsight CM customers at no additional cost. We encourage you to experiment with this exciting new feature and consider how you can use it to bring greater precision to your third-party risk management efforts.

This new feature is a direct result of our ongoing dialogue with customers about new product capabilities, and we appreciate all of the suggestions and beta testing feedback that helped us bring it to a successful launch. We have more exciting enhancements to Critical Asset Management and other Bitsight product capabilities on the way in the months ahead, and your input and suggestions are always appreciated.