Protecting the expanding attack surface
Organizations around the world are adopting a growing number of digital technologies and services to increase competitiveness and accelerate speed-to-market. From cloud infrastructure and BYOD initiatives to an increasingly mobile workforce, your IT environments are growing, and in turn increasing the size of your attack surface.
To defend against increasingly potent cybersecurity threats, including ransomware and social engineering, security teams must have a firm grasp of what their attack surface looks like, what the largest threats are, and how they can be thwarted. Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics helps accomplish these tasks as part of an effective security performance management program.
Best practices for defending your attack surface
These best practices can help to evaluate your attack surface and implement controls for mitigating risk:
Visualize your attack surface
You can’t protect what you can’t see. To understand what your attack surface looks like and where risk is concentrated, you need broad visibility into your entire digital footprint across geographies, business units, cloud service providers, subsidiaries, third parties, and home offices. With complete visibility, you can more easily spot the cyber risks related to each asset and prioritize resource allocation to better remediate risk exposure and drive process improvements where they’re the most pressing.
Monitor endpoints
Monitoring endpoints grows more complex every day as more users work outside the corporate network and devices connected to your network continue to proliferate. Securing this growing collection of endpoints requires an independent monitoring process to identify risky behavior and threats before they become an issue. As more employees choose to work from home, you’ll also need to set up protection for home network connections and establish employee cybersecurity policies and training. You’ll also need assessment tools to evaluate how your security controls for endpoints are performing.
Benchmark performance
Evaluating security performance and cyber risk exposure against industry peers can help to uncover gaps in your cybersecurity program. With superior benchmarking, you can create data-driven remediation plans to confidently meet security performance goals.
Set risk thresholds
While it’s impossible to completely eliminate risk, your teams must be clear on what represents an acceptable level of risk for your organization. By setting risk thresholds, you can continuously monitor the performance of your organization and third-party vendors in a manageable way, and take steps to remediate issues when thresholds are crossed.
Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics
Bitsight offers the world’s most widely adopted security ratings platform. Bitsight Security Ratings provide data-driven, dynamic measurements of an organization’s cybersecurity performance. By constantly monitoring the ratings of your organization and vendors, you can take a risk-based, outcome-driven approach to security performance and quickly launch, grow, or optimize your third-party risk management program.
Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics lets security managers continuously discover and segment the assets, applications, and devices that make up your growing attack surface. With Bitsight, you can assess your current level of risk exposure, prioritize high-risk assets, and take clear steps to reduce risk in your expanding digital ecosystem.
Bitsight’s capabilities enable you to:
- Visualize your digital assets. Bitsight’s centralized dashboard reveals the location of your digital assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, vendor, and business unit, along with the corresponding cyber risk associated with each.
- Uncover shadow IT. Perform security risk assessments to identify hidden assets and cloud instances, assessing them for risk and bringing them in line with security standards and internal policies.
- Pinpoint areas of disproportionate risk. Ecosystem-wide visibility into digital assets helps identify areas of critical risk and highest exposure so you can prioritize remediation.
- Monitor risk hidden in cloud environments. Bitsight improves cloud security posture management by providing visibility into the risk profile of assets stored in cloud environments, where shared security models make it difficult to know the security posture of cloud-hosted assets.
Reducing the attack surface outside your IT network
More employees are working from home today than ever before, introducing a new level of cyber risk to your attack surface. Typically, workers use unmonitored, interconnected, and less protected networks at home that are far more likely to be infected with malware.
Bitsight Work From Home is a new feature of the Bitsight platform that helps security teams quickly identify risks associated with the remote workforce and take steps to mitigate them.
Identify risky IP addresses
Bitsight’s mapping capability helps to discover risk on remote networks. By identifying potential issues with remote offices vs. corporate networks, security teams can drill down to identify compromised systems or open ports that could be exploited by malicious actors.
Enforce remediation
With greater visibility into the risks associated with home office networks, your teams can prioritize mitigation strategies, adopt robust cybersecurity controls, and strengthen security posture beyond the corporate network.
Why trust Bitsight?
Greater visibility
Through a proprietary method of data collection, Bitsight delivers unprecedented cybersecurity visibility into key risk vectors.
An engaged community
The value of the Bitsight platform is enhanced by a highly engaged community of cyber risk professionals who offer critical context that helps risk managers gain confidence in their security programs and interaction with third-party vendors.
Prioritized risk vectors
Bitsight Security Ratings are based on only the most critical, high-quality risk vectors. The importance of each vector is calculated to enable organizations to address their most significant areas of risk first.
A leading solution
Bitsight is the world’s most widely adopted Security Ratings solution. Four of the Top 5 investment banks use Bitsight for third-party risk management. Bitsight is the choice of all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms and 25% of Fortune 500 companies. Half of all the world’s cyber insurance premiums are underwritten by Bitsight customers.