What is an Attack Surface?
An organization’s attack surface is the sum of all the devices, access points, and IT assets that attackers may target within an IT environment as they attempt to gain access. Attack surfaces include endpoint devices and users as well as vulnerabilities within software and connected hardware.
As the digital perimeter of businesses continues to grow, there’s a great deal of talk about the expanding attack surface and how to protect it. There’s also a growing list of companies who, having failed to protect their massive attack surfaces, suffered breaches that exposed sensitive customer information and corporate data.
What is Attack Surface Monitoring?
Attack surface monitoring is the practice of continually gauging the size and composition of a company’s attack surface and evaluating the risks within it, such as ransomware and social engineering attacks.
How Can you Protect Your Attack Surface?
Protecting an attack surface has become more difficult as companies expand their digital footprint. From the adoption of cloud services to the use of remote/home networks and personal devices, a growing number of technology trends are contributing to the exponential growth of organizations’ attack surfaces.
Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics offers an effective way to gain visibility into your attack surface and the risks from cyber security threats and vulnerabilities within your digital ecosystem. With Bitsight, you get the attack surface monitoring solution you need to build better cyber security and risk management programs.
Best Practices for Defending Your Attack Surface
There are several critical best practices when it comes to protecting an attack surface:
Monitoring your endpoints
Continuous monitoring is essential to securing your endpoints. You’ll want to monitor endpoints and devices like laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and tablets as well as digital environments like services and cloud services. New servers and network connections from vendors and employees working from home must also be carefully observed. You’ll also want to use a cyber security assessment tool to see how your internal security controls are performing and to determine which endpoints pose the greatest risk in your attack surface.
Visualizing vulnerabilities
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.
To reduce the opportunities for attack, you can perform a cyber security vulnerability assessment to discover vulnerabilities through simulation forecasting. By running scenarios that mimic the work of a malicious attacker, you can gain a clear picture of where your vulnerable spots are, what damage they might allow, and how you can remediate them.
Reducing human error
Your users are the weakest link in your security chain, and it’s hard to protect against human error. No matter how many controls or programs you put in place to protect your attack surface, users can often inadvertently and unknowingly find a way to subvert them. Protecting your attack surface from human error requires superior awareness training. You can also limit the devices employees are allowed to use for work and require security measures such as two-factor authentication and frequent password changes.
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.
