What is cyber exposure?

Cyber exposure is the risk associated with all the vulnerabilities and threats to networks, data, applications, and systems in an organization’s IT environment.

What is exposure management?

Cyber exposure management is a security practice designed to proactively identify, assess, and mitigate vulnerabilities and threats within an organization's digital ecosystem. By identifying cyber exposure, organizations can calculate the level of risk associated with each exposure, evaluate the effectiveness of security controls intended to mitigate each type of risk, and prioritize the steps required to improve security programs and remediate vulnerabilities.

Strengthen security posture with effective exposure management

More organizations today are realizing that cyber risk is business risk, prompting boards of directors to ask hard questions around exposure management. For CISOs and risk leaders, it’s a time of enormous change—but also a time of significant opportunity. Boards are looking to their CISOs to not only protect the organization from risk, but to lead the business as it navigates waves of disruption from expanding infrastructure, changing work models, and sophisticated cyber threats.

Given these expectations, CISOs need powerful solutions to manage growing cyber risk and uncertainty. The right solutions will uncover blind spots of exposure and quantify the impact of that exposure in business terms. A cyber risk management solution must measure efforts to manage risk, revealing what the organization is doing right and where more investment is needed to address areas of disproportionate risk.

As the global leader and category creator in the cybersecurity ratings industry, Bitsight now delivers solutions that empower CISOs and risk professionals to more effectively and holistically manage cyber risk and improve exposure management. With Bitsight, CISOs can demonstrate where the organization is exposed, what the current and potential financial risks are to the organization, and how risk management and security programs are performing.

How to improve exposure management

Your CISOs and risk leaders can enhance exposure management by focusing on four key initiatives.

Prioritize vulnerability management

Security vulnerabilities in software, hardware, and devices are constantly increasing. The number of new disclosed cyber vulnerabilities jumped 25 percent in 2022, and the number of “Known Exploited Vulnerabilities” nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022. To address vulnerabilities in your IT environment and your third-party ecosystem, your risk teams need tools to assess the level of potential exposure and prioritize the most dangerous vulnerabilities for remediation.

Visualize the attack surface

Identifying all the components of your attack surface grows more difficult as your IT environment evolves and your organization relies more heavily on cloud service providers. Lacking visibility into internal and external assets in your attack surface leaves you vulnerable to breaches, ransomware, and other cybersecurity incidents. To better manage your exposure, you need tools that deliver exceptional visibility into all aspects of your attack surface—on-premises, in the cloud, and throughout your supply chain.

Understand third-party risks

A successful attack on a vendor can disrupt your business, cause financial losses, damage your reputation, and even compromise your own data and IT environment. Traditional solutions for third-party risk management such as periodic questionnaires and annual risk assessments make it difficult to accurately assess cyber risk, especially risk from emerging zero-day vulnerabilities. Effective exposure management requires tools to augment annual assessments with continuous monitoring of risk in third-party relationships.

Communicate with stakeholders

Your security risk management teams must effectively communicate details around cybersecurity posture to essential stakeholders such as your board, executives, and the capital marketplace. Yet too often, security reports are presented with language, detail, and metrics that are difficult for non-technical stakeholders to digest and use for critical decisions. To keep stakeholders informed, prove performance, and facilitate better decision making, your teams need tools that can present exposure management details in language that is recognized and understood by a broad, external audience.

Exposure management with Bitsight

Enterprises of all sizes and industries rely on Bitsight to expand distributed ecosystems without expanding attack surfaces, accelerate transformation without accelerating financial woes, and add vendors without adding their vulnerabilities. Bitsight’s comprehensive and integrated cyber risk management capabilities help forward-thinking, growth-centered CISOs prioritize cybersecurity investments, build trust across their ecosystems, and minimize the likelihood of financial loss.

Our solution empowers CISOs and risk leaders to address all areas of exposure management.

• Vulnerability management. Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) continuously monitors your network— including endpoints, applications, databases, cloud instances, remote offices, and shadow IT—to identify vulnerabilities and alert security teams in near-real time. With Bitsight, your security teams can drill down into the root causes of vulnerabilities, identify hidden risks, and prioritize remediation.
• Attack surface management. Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics delivers a complete view of the attack surface and reveals where your organization’s cyber risk resides. With visibility into digital assets, shadow IT, and areas of disproportionate risk, your security teams can better identify and remediate risk in your digital ecosystem.
• Vendor risk monitoring. Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) augments your annual vendor risk assessments by continuously monitoring risk in your third-party ecosystem, detecting critical vulnerabilities, and prioritizing outreach to vendors to remediate vulnerabilities at scale. Bitsight TPRM tracks vendor security posture, detects emerging zero-day events, scales vendor outreach efforts, and streamlines regulatory reporting.
• Reporting and communication. Bitsight Executive Cybersecurity Reporting provides independent, objective analytics and actionable risk insights that allow security leaders to converse more effectively with internal and external stakeholders. Providing language, metrics, and context that can be understood by a broad audience, Bitsight enables security teams to communicate key insights and intelligence so that executives and board members can make more informed decisions about security investments and resources.

Managing exposure with actionable risk insights

All our solutions are powered by the Bitsight Cyber Risk Analytics Engine. This powerful technology processes 200 billion events daily and scans 40 million entities dating back 12 months to deliver market-leading data, insights, and workflows. The engine calculates and correlates business practices to negative outcomes and quantified risks, providing CISOs with actionable insights in enterprise security, digital supply chain, cyber insurance, and data analysis.

With Bitsight’s actionable risk insights, CISOs and risk leaders can:

• Understand risk. Bitsight processes and quantifies Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) to deliver meaningful analytics that facilitate communication with business stakeholders.
• Correlate to outcomes. Bitsight analytics allow CISOs to understand the likelihood of cyber incidents and their impact on financial performance.
• Qualify vendors. Bitsight reveals potential risks across the supply chain, empowering TPRM teams to manage vendors and limit third-party risk exposure more effectively.
• Assess performance. Bitsight’s exposure management tools reveal the areas of highest exposure and identify where to invest to quickly remediate and minimize the impact of loss.
• Prioritize investments. CISOs rely on Bitsight to make more informed, evidence-based decisions and to prioritize investments with confidence.
• Communicate and govern. Financial quantification of reporting tools enables CISOs to engage the board at a business level, translating technical details into business imperatives.
• Get right-sized insurance. With Bitsight, businesses can balance insurance requirements against exposure to cyber risk and align policies with risk appetite.

Why CISOs trust Bitsight

An industry-leading solution

Bitsight is the world’s leading provider of cyber risk intelligence, transforming how security leaders manage and mitigate risk. Leveraging the most comprehensive external data and analytics, Bitsight empowers organizations to make confident, data-backed decisions and equips security and compliance teams from over 3,300 organizations across 70+ countries with the tools to proactively detect exposures and take immediate action to protect their enterprises and supply chains. Bitsight customers include 38% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and 180+ government agencies and quasi-governmental authorities, including U.S. and global financial regulators.

Extensive visibility

Bitsight operates one of the largest risk datasets in the world. Leveraging over 10 years of experience collecting, attributing, and assessing risk across millions of entities, we combine the power of AI with the curation of technical researchers to unlock an unparalleled view of your organization. Bitsight offers more complete visibility into important risk areas such as botnets, mobile apps, IoT systems, and more. Our cyber data collection and scanning capabilities include:

• 40 million+ monitored entities
• 540 billion+ cyber events in our data lake
• 4 billion+ routable IP addresses 
• 500 million+ domains monitored
• 400 billion+ events ingested daily
• 12+ months of historical data

Superior analytics

Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.

Ratings validation

Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.

Quantifiable outcomes

Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.

Prioritization of risk vectors

Bitsight incorporates the criticality of risk vectors in to calculation of Security Ratings, highlighting risk in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets and vulnerabilities are ranked higher.

What is cyber exposure management?

Cyber exposure management is the practice of continuously monitoring cyber exposure, measuring the effectiveness of security programs, and taking steps to address the areas of greatest risk and exposure.

The challenge of cyber exposure management

CISOs and risk leaders today face a host of new challenges and opportunities. Massive digital footprints continue to expand, the cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, and insurance premiums are on the rise. At the same time, more boards of directors are accepting that cyber risk is business risk and are inviting CISOs to take a greater role in leading the company by enhancing cyber exposure management.

To excel in this expanded role, CISOs need exposure management tools that can help their organizations achieve alignment on how to quantify risk, manage it, and make the right investments to mitigate it. The right solutions must help CISOs uncover risk blind spots, assess performance, qualify vendors, and minimize financial loss at scale.

As a global cyber risk management leader, Bitsight offers cyber exposure management solutions that transform how organizations manage cyber exposure, security performance, and cyber risk for themselves and their third parties. Built on more than a decade of market-leading innovation, Bitsight offers integrated solutions that deliver value across enterprise security performance, digital supply chains, cyber insurance, and data analysis.

How to reduce your cyber exposure

There are four key steps you can take to limit your organization’s cyber exposure and strengthen defenses against potential threats.

Proactively identify risk

As your digital ecosystem expands, cyber risk management tools can constantly and automatically search for and identify areas of cyber exposure. Points of exposure may include misconfigured software, software vulnerabilities, unpatched systems, open ports, and other areas of risk that may easily be exploited by attackers. With superior technology, you can identify areas of disproportionate risk across your digital ecosystem and prioritize remediation to improve your security posture.

Establish a cyber exposure response team

To effectively manage cyber exposure and mitigate risks, you’ll need the combined efforts of individuals from different business units and disciplines throughout your organization. Your CISO will lead efforts to manage immediate threats, but your legal team will need to jump in when customer data is exposed. Communications teams must craft messaging and reach out to customers, partners, and stakeholders in the event of a breach, and sales teams will need to do the same with prospects and partners. HR managers play an important role as well in helping to alleviate employee concerns.

Create a communication plan

When a breach occurs, your team will need to alert stakeholders, customers, vendors, employees, and partners about what has happened even as your technical teams work to mitigate the damage. Communication efforts should explain clearly what has happened, how it will impact each audience, and what you’re doing to address the problem now and in the future. An effective communications plan will mitigate long-term financial impact and reputational challenges.

Monitor your attack surface continuously

Because the cyber threat landscape changes daily, you must continuously monitor the attack surface of both your organization and your third-party vendors to ensure the security controls in place meet your standards. This is a change from traditional third-party risk management practices that rely on annual or bi-annual questionnaires to monitor vendors’ security postures.

Cyber exposure management with Bitsight

Having created the security ratings industry in 2011, Bitsight has expanded to offer integrated solutions that address the broader challenges of CISOs and risk leaders. As digital transformation, supply chain risk, and expanded attack surfaces create greater cyber exposure, our comprehensive approach to cyber risk management helps global enterprises, governments, and organizations prioritize cybersecurity investments, reduce the chances of financial loss, and build greater trust within their ecosystem.

As one of the core solutions on our platform, Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) is a cybersecurity governance and cyber exposure management solution that gives risk and security leaders unique insights to drive strategy and improve security performance. With Bitsight SPM, you can see what attackers see, understand your financial exposure, and prioritize remediation to address your most serious vulnerabilities. This cyber risk management solution empowers you to elevate cyber exposure management, confidently communicating and proving program performance to organizational leadership and board members.

Based on Bitsight’s Cyber Risk Analytics Engine that delivers market-leading data, insights, and workflows, SPM provides superior capabilities in several key areas.

• External attack surface management. Gain full visibility into your attack surface and understand where exposure exists today and how to monitor it in the future. Continuously discover new assets that require protection and prioritize your most vulnerable areas.
• Governance and analytics. Build an effective cyber exposure management strategy with objective, proven metrics and security ratings that are correlated to outcomes. Identify areas for focus, implement improvement plans that make sense, and track performance over time in meaningful ways.
• Cyber risk quantification. Translate cyber risk into financial terms that board members can understand and leaders can use to manage risk. Set the right priorities, calibrate cyber insurance based on unique risk appetites, and prove ROI over time to stakeholders.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

Part of Bitsight SPM, Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics delivers a comprehensive view of your attack surface both on-premises and in the cloud to enhance cyber exposure management. With this security risk management solution, you can continuously discover and segment the assets, applications, and devices that are part of your expanding digital footprint. Bitsight also makes it easy to assess current risk exposure, prioritize your most valuable assets, and take actions to reduce risk.

With Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics, you can:

• Gain greater visibility into digital assets. A centralized dashboard reveals the location of your organization’s digital assets broken down by cloud provider, business unit, and geography. Bitsight also calculates the corresponding cyber risk associated with each asset to enable faster remediation.
• Uncover shadow IT. Identify hidden assets and cloud instances, evaluate their risk level, and align them with your organization’s security policies.
• Pinpoint areas of disproportionate risk. Visualize areas of critical or excessive risk—including areas of highest exposure—to prioritize remediation.
• Monitor risk within shared responsibility models for cloud services. The shared security model used by most cloud providers makes it difficult to understand and track the security posture of cloud-hosted assets. Bitsight helps eliminate security gaps by providing visibility into the risk profile of assets stored in cloud environments.
• Identify risk on remote networks. Discover cyber risk associated with the expanded attack surface created by home and remote offices and unmonitored or unsecured connections.

In addition to tools for managing security performance, Bitsight also offers third-party risk management capabilities with technology for vendor risk assessment and vendor risk monitoring to accurately identify and prioritize risk within larger digital ecosystems.

Why CISOs choose Bitsight

An industry-leading solution

Bitsight is the world’s leading provider of cyber risk intelligence, transforming how security leaders manage and mitigate risk. Leveraging the most comprehensive external data and analytics, Bitsight empowers organizations to make confident, data-backed decisions and equips security and compliance teams from over 3,300 organizations across 70+ countries with the tools to proactively detect exposures and take immediate action to protect their enterprises and supply chains. Bitsight customers include 38% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and 180+ government agencies and quasi-governmental authorities, including U.S. and global financial regulators.

Extensive visibility

Bitsight operates one of the largest risk datasets in the world. Leveraging over 10 years of experience collecting, attributing, and assessing risk across millions of entities, we combine the power of AI with the curation of technical researchers to unlock an unparalleled view of your organization. Bitsight offers more complete visibility into important risk areas such as botnets, mobile apps, IoT systems, and more. Our cyber data collection and scanning capabilities include:

• 40 million+ monitored entities
• 540 billion+ cyber events in our data lake
• 4 billion+ routable IP addresses 
• 500 million+ domains monitored
• 400 billion+ events ingested daily
• 12+ months of historical data

Superior analytics

Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.

Ratings validation

Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.

Quantifiable outcomes

Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.

Prioritization of risk vectors

Bitsight incorporates the criticality of risk vectors in to calculation of Security Ratings, highlighting risk in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets and vulnerabilities are ranked higher.

1. How to Perform an Attack Surface Assessment

An attack surface assessment is the initial step in attack surface monitoring, which involves:

• Inventory of Digital Assets: Documenting all hardware, software, and network components used by the organization.
• Identification of Potential Vulnerabilities: Pinpointing weaknesses that could be exploited by attackers within those assets.
• Security Posture Evaluation: Analyzing the current security measures and their effectiveness in protecting against potential threats.

2. Analyzing Assessment Results

Attack Surface Analysis delves deeper into the insights gained from the attack surface assessment.

This part of attack surface monitoring involves interpreting the data to understand the severity and potential impact of identified vulnerabilities. By doing so, organizations can prioritize their responses and tailor their monitoring efforts to the areas of greatest concern.

Crucially, attack surface analysis doesn't stop at identification. It extends into action, taking steps to mitigate security risks through strategic planning and remediation efforts.

This proactive measure is a cornerstone of comprehensive attack surface management (ASM), which encompasses a lot more than attack surface monitoring, including vulnerability management and vendor risk assessment.

3. External Attack Surface Monitoring

With more employees working remotely and from home, your attack surface becomes larger and more difficult to protect. Remote and home networks are often unmonitored and less protected. As a result, they’re more likely to be infected with malware and to expose vulnerable services.

External Attack Surface Monitoring (EASM) zeroes in on the part of the attack surface exposed to external entities. This monitoring is crucial for safeguarding interfaces that could be targeted by external threats and is a key aspect of holistic attack surface monitoring.