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Attack Surface Management (ASM) involves the continuous discovery, prioritisation, and monitoring of an enterprise's IT infrastructure to enhance security. By adopting the perspective of an attacker, this approach effectively protects enterprises’ digital assets. Nowadays, cyber threats are increasingly prevalent, making the effective management of the attack surface crucial for safeguarding enterprises’ data and systems.
What Is an Attack Surface?
An attack surface encompasses all the potential points where unauthorised users can attempt to enter or extract data from an enterprise. Generally, attack surfaces can be divided into three aspects: physical, digital, and social.
Physical Attack Surface
The physical attack surface includes devices like computers, smartphones, and other hardware that can be physically accessed or compromised. These are the traditional entry points for security breaches which require stringent physical security measures to protect.
Digital Attack Surface
The digital attack surface involves all the software and hardware that connects to an enterprise’s network, including applications, websites and servers. The increasing complexity and extensive connections within digital networks have made this surface difficult to manage. Each of these components can act as a gateway for cybercriminals if not properly secured so it is a critical area of focus for cybersecurity efforts.
Social Attack Surface
The social attack surface, also known as Social engineering attack surface, involves human interactions and behaviours to gain unauthorised access to sensitive systems or information. This type of attack exploits human tendencies to trust and help others, leading to unintentional mistakes and security breaches. Common vulnerabilities within this attack surface include:
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Sharing confidential information
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Visiting unsecured or inappropriate websites
Mitigate Potential Risks by Attack Surface Management
The dynamic and complex nature of modern IT environments leading to an expanding scope of attack surfaces, bring new vulnerabilities and challenges in maintaining cybersecurity.
Attack surface management plays a vital role in preventing enterprises from falling victim to cyberattacks by continuously identifying and addressing vulnerabilities. As a proactive approach, attack surface management involves several key practices that contribute to a more secure environment.
The Mechanism: How Attack Surface Management Works?
Asset Discovery
Attack surface management begins by identifying all assets that make up the enterprise's attack surface, including digital and physical assets.
Asset Prioritization
Once assets are identified, they are then prioritised based on their criticality and potential risk factors. This prioritisation aims to help in focusing resources and efforts on the areas that pose the greatest risk, ensuring that the most critical vulnerabilities will be addressed first.
Risk Analysis
To accurately identify the vulnerabilities of these assets, enterprises should conduct a risk analysis, which encompasses both threat identification and vulnerability identification.
Threat identification aims to uncover potential threats, including both internal and external threats such as malicious actors and human errors. Through a comprehensive threat assessment, enterprises can understand the existing threats, develop appropriate defence strategies, and estimate the potential impact.
Vulnerability identification focuses on identifying weaknesses in systems, processes, cloud infrastructures, or applications that could be exploited by threats. This helps analyse and determine both the difficulty of exploiting the vulnerability and the degree of impact.
The significance of vulnerability and threat identification lies in determining the probability of security incidents occurring, while the previously conducted asset discovery can be used to evaluate the potential losses caused by security incidents. By gathering these evaluation results, enterprises can quantify their risks by assigning a 'Risk Value', which helps prioritise their defence strategies effectively.
Remediation
The next step in attack surface management is remediation. Its purpose is to address the identified vulnerabilities through various methods, such as patching outdated software, tightening network access controls, and conducting training sessions to mitigate risks of social engineering attacks. Another key method is segmenting the network, which means dividing the network into smaller, isolated segments to limit the spread of potential threats. Each of these remedial actions is critical in reducing the overall attack surface and enhancing the enterprise’s security posture.
Continuous Monitoring
Yet remediation is not the final step. A comprehensive and effective attack surface management must involve continuous monitoring and regular assessments. By using automated scanning tools and threat detection systems, enterprises can keep a close eye on their attack surfaces, enterprises can detect and respond to threats promptly, and receive alerts about potential security breaches.
Additionally, collecting threat intelligence plays a crucial role in the monitoring process. Enterprises should always review their attack surface management and quantify a security rating and collect latest information about potential threats from various sources, helping them stay ahead of potential attacks and maintain a strong security posture over time.
Safeguard Your Business with Attack Surface Management
Attack surface management effectively enhances cyber security by systematically identifying, assessing, and mitigating vulnerabilities. This process is important in creating a robust barrier against cyber threats and ensuring the safety of an enterprise's digital and physical assets. By employing attack surface management, enterprises can significantly prevent cyberattacks and other potential breaches.
Be Faster Than the Hackers
As your trusted TechOps Security Enabler, CITIC Telecom CPC provides TrustCSI™ 3.0, a comprehensive managed cybersecurity solution for enterprises. At the Identify & Predict pillar, the cornerstone of our cybersecurity framework, we offer Asset Identification, Vulnerability Assessment, and Penetration Testing services which enable enterprises to identify their assets, assess vulnerabilities, and conduct penetration tests to uncover and address security gaps.
Asset Identification Service
Accurate asset identification is the critical first step in establishing an effective security strategy. Without a clear understanding of your assets, both enterprises and Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) face significant challenges in evaluating cybersecurity risks and identifying potential attack surfaces. CITIC Telecom CPC's Asset Identification Service provides detailed visibility into all digital and physical assets, enabling a thorough understanding of the attack surface and laying the groundwork for robust security strategies.
Vulnerability Assessment Service
The next step is to assess the vulnerabilities of the identified assets. Our Vulnerability Assessment Service thoroughly evaluates potential weaknesses within an enterprise's infrastructure, helping to prioritise vulnerabilities and make informed decisions on risk management and remediation. CITIC Telecom CPC also provides optional re-audit services to verify the effectiveness of remediation actions, ensuring continuous improvement in security posture.
Penetration Test Service
After assessing vulnerabilities, our Penetration Test Service simulates real-world cyber-attacks to identify exploitable weaknesses. We offer external and internal penetration testing exercises that simulate attacks in different scenarios, from simulating exploits against Internet-facing digital assets to insider attacks. By leverage AI technologies, the Penetration Test with AI is a lightweight and routine self-testing solution simplifies security assessments and helps enterprises enhance their cybersecurity posture.
By integrating these services, enterprises can establish a robust defence again potential threatsy posture, effectively managing risks and safeguarding critical assets.
Conclusion
The comprehensive approach of ASM not only helps in the early detection and management of vulnerabilities but also ensures that protective measures are continuously updated to face new challenges. As cyber threats evolve, maintaining an effective ASM process becomes indispensable for safeguarding vital assets and maintaining operational integrity. By systematically managing the attack surface through identification, prioritisation, remediation, and continuous monitoring, enterprises can significantly improve their security stance and resilience against cyber threats.
CITIC Telecom CPC’s TrustCSI™ 3.0 provides a robust foundation for comprehensive attack surface management, integrating advanced capabilities across asset identification, vulnerability assessment, and penetration testing. This holistic solution enables enterprises to build stronger defences against potential cyber intrusions, utilising advanced threat detection, automated vulnerability management, comprehensive security monitoring, and tailored security solutions. By leveraging TrustCSI™ 3.0, enterprises can achieve a resilient cybersecurity posture, effectively managing risks and safeguarding critical assets against evolving cyber threats.
