With cyber attacks becoming more prominent and frequent, attack surface reduction should be a crucial part of every organization’s priority list. In a software environment, an attack surface is defined as the total sum of vulnerabilities exposed in and out of any application.
Protecting the attack surface was more straightforward when there were restrictions between a company’s assets and the outside world. However, these boundaries have disappeared thanks to the new generation of technologies, causing the attack surface to grow colossally.
Related Reading: Cyber Risk Management through Attack Surface Analysis
With the noticeable rise in cyber attacks, organizations are required to reduce the attack surface to lower the opportunities available for attackers.
Here are three ways to scale down your organization’s attack surface:
1. Downgrade Exposure
We recommend reducing the area of exposure to minimize the attack surface of your system. This could be achieved by reducing functionality codes such as functions, protocols, etc., utilizing protected defenses, and removing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are susceptible to cyber attacks.
2. Reduce Preventable Complexity
A great way to reduce the attack surface of your system is by removing preventable complexity, which might cause an issue in the long term. Complexity can happen due to poor policy management or lack of data during the design phase of the development cycle.
3. Identify Your Vulnerabilities
Completing a vulnerability scan is one of the most effective ways to reduce the attack surface. By building a real-time model of your application with the potential cyber risks and vulnerabilities, security IT departments can visualize vulnerabilities and come up with possible solutions thus creating a proactive versus a reactive approach.
Threat modeling is known as the best approach to identify threats and reduce the attack surface of any application. By building a threat model, organizations can reduce the highest amount of risk in the most resourceful way possible.
ThreatModeler is the first and only threat modeling tool that can give CISOs and other key decision makers a comprehensive solution for identifying potential threats and reducing the attack surface, providing the proper mitigation strategies.
To learn more about how ThreatModeler™ can help your organization build a scalable threat modeling process, book a demo to speak to a ThreatModeler expert today.