Improve attack surface management with continuous visibility
Transformational changes in the digital ecosystem have made it easier to adopt cloud services and support hybrid workforces—but harder for CISOs to manage the attack surface. As IT environments grow in complexity, it’s difficult to get a handle on the risks hidden in digital assets across all cloud environments, geographies, subsidiaries, and remote endpoints.
To effectively protect their organizations, CISOs need attack surface management solutions that deliver continuous visibility into all assets, applications, and devices within a growing digital footprint. Attack surface management tools must help CISOs assess risk within the attack surface, identify the highest-risk assets, and take steps to remediate exposure.
As a global leader in cyber risk management, Bitsight offers an attack surface management solution with tools to map your digital footprint, see your exposure, respond to vulnerabilities, and remediate problems fast.
Best practices for managing your attack surface
These four best practices are critical to effective attack surface management.
Visualize the attack surface
Because you can’t secure what you can’t see, attack surface management requires you to have a crystal-clear view of your digital footprint across all business units, subsidiaries, cloud service providers, third parties, and remote offices. With comprehensive visibility, you can more easily assess risk for each asset and allocate resources to address the most pressing priorities.
Continuously monitor the environment
Monitoring your environment for threat exposure grows more challenging every day as your footprint expands, your network becomes more complex, and your remote workforce grows. Siloed security tools typically produce a mountain of data and constant alerts, making it hard to identify threats within the noise. Effective attack surface management requires continuous monitoring of endpoints such as new digital assets, recently onboarded vendors, and remote employees. You’ll also need to monitor home network connections as well as internal controls to see how successfully your cybersecurity program is performing.
Benchmark security programs
Independent benchmarking is an objective analysis of an organization’s cybersecurity performance based on quantitative data from non-intrusive, continuous, comprehensive collection mechanisms—which allows for the creation of comparable, reliable insights and metrics.
In today’s constantly evolving security landscape, benchmarking the performance of your security controls against industry peers can help uncover gaps in your cybersecurity programs. Effective benchmarking enables you to create data-driven remediation plans to confidently meet security performance goals and communicate cybersecurity performance to shareholders and the broader marketplace.
Set acceptable risk thresholds
Since it’s impossible to prevent 100% of threats, you’ll need to determine acceptable risk thresholds as you make decisions about your security program and third-party risk management. Establishing acceptable risk thresholds lets you focus resources and time on addressing the most important areas of cyber risk and quickly take action when thresholds are crossed.
Attack surface management with Bitsight
Bitsight provides cyber risk management solutions that transform how organizations manage exposure, performance, and risk for themselves and their third parties. Built on more than a decade of technological innovation, Bitsight’s integrated solutions deliver value across enterprise security performance, digital supply chains, cyber insurance, and data analysis.
Bitsight External Attack Surface Management (EASM) delivers the power to keep track of countless digital assets and visualize cloud infrastructure at any given moment. With Bitsight EASM, you’ll see what attackers see when they look at your digital ecosystem, and you’ll have the tools to fix immediate exposures and get to the root cause of issues so you don’t see repeat problems.
Bitsight External Attack Surface Management enables you to:
- Map your company. Map your digital footprint on day one to discover and classify your digital assets. View your environment from a 10,000-foot perspective or view granular detail about individual assets. Continuously monitor to see what’s changing and where you’re exposed.
- Analyze your exposure. Gather insights on your entire infrastructure with minimal work. See exposure data from vulnerabilities, compromised systems, shadow IT, user behavior, public disclosures, and configurations across email, software, and the web. Drill down into the areas that matter most to you, like subsidiary, geography, or technology.
- Address vulnerabilities. Get a full view of known vulnerabilities as well as exposure across your extended enterprise when major security events and new vulnerabilities arise. Prioritize vulnerabilities for remediation based on their severity.
- Remediate issues. Get to the root cause of issues so you can stop fixing the same problems over and over. Continuously evaluate your security controls to improve attack surface management and prevent cyberattacks. Set processes that can scale with your team. Prioritize and communicate performance to stakeholders.
Extend attack surface management to third parties
With Bitsight, you can use the same attack surface management tools you use on your own ecosystem to help third parties expedite remediation of their vulnerable areas.
Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM)
Bitsight TPRM provides end-to-end risk management across your digital supply chain. With Bitsight, your risk leaders can improve cyber exposure management across the digital ecosystem from start to finish, continuously monitoring and uncovering blind spots within the digital ecosystem and taking swift action to remediate exposure.
- Scale vendor risk assessment and management to enable business growth.
- Accelerate onboarding with automated assessments.
- Validate vendor responses with objective data.
- Improve the security posture of your vendor portfolio through continuous vendor risk monitoring.
- Detect and address ongoing third-party risk and automatically discover fourth-party product usage.
- Handle major security events across third and fourth parties to improve exposure management.
- Improve efficiency and scalability of vendor outreach.
- Bitsight Third-Party Vulnerability Detection and Response
As part of TPRM, Bitsight Third-Party Vulnerability Detection and Response delivers greater visibility into major security events and other vulnerabilities impacting your digital ecosystem. This Bitsight solution delivers industry-leading data and analytics that are updated daily, along with risk data in multiple, easy-to-digest views tailored to the needs of your security program on any given day.
Why Bitsight?
Business leaders, risk leaders, and boards turn to Bitsight for integrated solutions to manage risk and build trust across their ecosystem. Over 3,000 global enterprises trust Bitsight’s data, tools, and integrated applications to drive critical workflows across exposure, performance, and risk. With Bitsight, companies can accelerate transformation without risking financial turbulence, add vendors without adding their vulnerabilities, and get everyone talking a universal language when it comes to cyber risk.
As the foundation of all Bitsight applications, The Bitsight Cyber Risk Analytics Engine scans 40 million entities dating back 12 months and processes 200 billion events daily. By calculating and correlating business practices to negative outcomes and quantified risks, Bitsight delivers actionable insights in enterprise security, digital supply chain, cyber insurance, and data analysis.
Bitsight’s integrated solutions, data, and workflows are trusted by over 180 government institutions, four of the Big four accounting firms, and 38 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
- Uncover specific vulnerabilities that impact your network.
- Respond to zero-day attacks and other security events with greater speed.
- Scale and track vendor outreach efforts with precision.
- Remediate risk more quickly by prioritizing vendor outreach efforts.
- Get details of vendors impacted by vulnerabilities to improve collaboration and mitigation efforts.
- Initiate vendor outreach during zero-day attacks or major security events and monitor responses to take additional action as needed.
- Provide board and business stakeholders with accurate data and remediation plans during major security events.