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.

A new era of cybersecurity performance management

Cybersecurity-related risk is now rated as the second highest source of risk for the enterprise. The stakes are enormous: a cybersecurity breach can result in significant financial harm, damage to reputation, loss of customers’ trust, and loss of data and intellectual property.

Cybersecurity performance management solutions help your organization drive accountability for security outcomes and align investments and actions with the highest measurable impact over time. Ideally, your security performance management program should enable security and risk leaders to efficiently allocate limited resources to the most critical areas of cyber risk. Yet, traditional methods for managing risk and monitoring performance have relied on penetration testing, cyber threat intelligence, and periodic security assessments. These methods only include point-in-time metrics that can’t provide a continuous view of how security programs are performing.

Bitsight offers a modern, more effective way to develop your cyber risk strategy and manage security performance. Bitsight for Security Performance Management (SPM) enables continuous monitoring of security performance through daily security ratings that offer clear, objective, data-driven measurements.

How security ratings work

CIOs, CISOs, and other security and risk leaders are constantly required to answer critical security questions:

• How secure is the organization?
• Is security improving over time?
• Are investments in cybersecurity paying off?
• Is the company more or less secure than industry peers?

To answer these questions, security teams have traditionally relied on periodic audits, assessments, and legacy benchmarking methods to quantify cyber risk and measure the effectiveness of security controls. These security analytics often require a great deal of time to aggregate complex metrics, yet the point-in-time results they produce are outdated almost immediately.

Security ratings provide an alternative way to manage cybersecurity performance and to communicate risk to senior executives and board members in a way that’s easy to understand. Security ratings are based on externally observable and verifiable data that’s collected and analyzed daily. Unlike security assessment tools that review a company’s policies or conduct periodic scans, security ratings are based on objective evidence of an organization’s compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. The result is an objective, evidence-based measure of performance that provides clear insight into the effectiveness of security programs and controls.

Armed with daily ratings, you can proactively identify, quantify, and manage cybersecurity risk throughout your ecosystem. Security ratings provide a common language that can be appreciated by both technical and non-technical individuals, facilitating conversations between cybersecurity professionals and executives and board members to improve decision-making around security investments.

Assess cybersecurity performance with Bitsight

Bitsight Security Performance Management makes it easier to build a security program that best fits your risk tolerance and organizational objectives. Providing continuous visibility of your extended digital footprint, SPM facilitates cyber risk oversight and continuously monitors the effectiveness of your security controls. Combining meaningful KPIs with analytical insights, Bitsight simplifies, streamlines, and dramatically improves cybersecurity performance management.

With SPM, your security and risk teams can:

• Monitor the effectiveness of security programs on a daily basis, rather than at specific points in time throughout the year.
• Create and facilitate uniform performance targets across your organization.
• Provide in-depth comparisons of your organization’s cybersecurity performance management against peers.
• Communicate performance metrics to non-technical stakeholders while also providing meaningful context.
• Streamline program management decisions, including decisions around ongoing remediation of security controls.
• Determine the likelihood of a cybersecurity attack on specific business units or geographies.

In addition to SPM, Bitsight offers solutions to manage third-party risk, complementing vendor risk assessments with continuous monitoring to strengthen IT vendor risk management.

Benefits for cybersecurity performance management

Continuous visibility

Unlike traditional assessments and security audits, Bitsight for SPM enables your teams to see what’s working and what isn’t on a daily basis.

Accurate metrics

Bitsight enables you to track progress over time, setting goals and prioritizing different parts of your program while determining the effectiveness of your investments.

Manage third-party risk

Bitsight security ratings can help your teams decide whether to work with vendors, M&A targets, insurance applicants, integration partners, and other third parties based on the level of cybersecurity risk they represent.

Resource allocation

By combining data from security ratings with recent cybersecurity audits, you can effectively determine which parts of your program need resources and investment immediately. Continuous monitoring capabilities enable you to prioritize resources more accurately, focusing on investments that will quickly yield the greatest results.

Data-driven benchmarking

Bitsight monitors over 40 million organizations and maps 1 million entities. Bitsight enables you to easily compare your own cybersecurity performance management efforts to hundreds or thousands of competitors and peers.

Intuitive reports

Bitsight security ratings are as easy to understand as a credit score, enabling board members and executives to immediately get a handle on the organization’s cybersecurity performance. Bitsight ratings also provide the data analytics and cybersecurity reporting capabilities that can help your security teams to justify of investments in cybersecurity performance management and demonstrate the measurable improvements that your programs achieve.

Why 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.