Attack surface management
Holistic Visibility and Proactive Risk Mitigation
What Is an Attack Surface?
An attack surface refers to all the points, interfaces, and avenues through which a bad actor can try to enter or extract information from a system, network, or application. These include:
- Cloud infrastructure: Components of cloud-based systems, including configurations, access controls, and data storage
- Software: Applications, operating systems, and software dependencies
- Network interfaces: Network devices, ports, protocols, and services
- Web applications: Websites, web services, and web-based platforms
- Hardware devices: Physical devices connected to a network, such as IoT devices, servers, routers, and other hardware components
- Endpoints: Devices (computers, smartphones, tablets) that connect to a network
- Human factors: Human users are often targeted through social engineering, phishing attacks, or other methods
- Third-party services or integrations: Dependencies on external services or integrations that may introduce vulnerabilities if those services lack proper security measures
What Is Attack Surface Management?
Attack surface management (ASM) refers to the continuous process of identifying, assessing, and managing the various points of an organization’s attack surface. The process includes:
Asset Discovery: Automatically and continuously scans for and identifies internet-facing hardware, software, and cloud assets that could act as entry points.
- Known assets are all IT infrastructure and resources the organization is aware of and actively managing—routers, servers, company-issued or privately-owned devices (PCs, laptops, mobile devices), IoT devices, user directories, applications deployed on premises and in the cloud, web sites, and proprietary databases
- Unknown digital assets are the opposite: Devices, systems and applications that an organization and its security teams are unaware of and have not authorized in the network. These can include shadow IT, unauthorized devices, ransomware or unmanaged applications.
- Vendor assets the organization doesn’t own but are part of its IT infrastructure or digital supply chain. These include software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, APIs, public cloud assets, or third-party services used within the organization’s website.
- Rogue assets created or stolen by threat actors to target the company. This can include a phishing website impersonating a company’s brand or sensitive data stolen from a data breach being shared on the dark web.
Risk Assessment and Prioritization: This involves evaluating the potential impact and likelihood of exploitation. Prioritization is crucial to focus efforts on addressing the most critical vulnerabilities that pose the highest risk to the organization.
Remediation Planning and Implementation: Developing strategies and action plans to mitigate or eliminate identified vulnerabilities. This may involve applying security patches, making configuration changes, updating software versions, or implementing other security measures to reduce the attack surface.Continuous Monitoring and Adaptation: ASM is an ongoing and iterative process that involves regular scans, assessments, and updates to adapt to evolving threats and changes in the organization’s IT environment. It ensures that the attack surface remains minimized, and vulnerabilities are promptly addressed
Why Attack Surface Management Is Important
Reducing vulnerabilities: ASM identifies and mitigates vulnerabilities within an organization’s digital landscape. By cataloging and assessing various entry points, ASM helps fortify weak spots before attackers exploit them.
Comprehensive visibility: ASM offers a comprehensive view of an organization’s attack surface, providing insights into potential risks and points of vulnerability. It helps in understanding and managing the scope of possible threats.
Proactive security: ASM enables organizations to take proactive measures to stay ahead of cyber threats. Continuously monitoring and managing the attack surface minimizes the risk of successful cyberattacks.
Data-driven decision-making: ASM tools provide actionable insights and data to support informed decision-making. This allows organizations to prioritize vulnerabilities and allocate resources effectively for remediation efforts.
Threat Modeling in Attack Surface Management
Threat modeling plays a critical role in ASM by helping organizations proactively identify and mitigate potential security defects. Here’s when it fits into the ASM process:
- Discovery and mapping: Early in the ASM process, as you inventory assets and map your attack surface, threat modeling helps identify potential threat vectors, dependencies, and weaknesses.
- Risk assessment: After discovering your attack surface, use threat modeling to evaluate risks. This involves analyzing how attackers might exploit identified vulnerabilities and assessing the impact on your systems.
- Design and development: During the design phase of new systems or updates, threat modeling ensures security is built into the architecture, minimizing exposure before deployment.
- Continuous monitoring: As part of ongoing ASM efforts, threat modeling refines your understanding of evolving risks, particularly as assets, configurations, and attack tactics change.
- Incident response planning: Threat modeling informs robust response strategies by anticipating likely attack scenarios, allowing for quicker containment and mitigation.
Threat Modeling Methodologies
A variety of threat modeling frameworks are used to identify and address potential vulnerabilities. Here’s a quick overview:
- OCTAVE: Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation
- PASTA: Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis
- STRIDE: Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of service, Elevation of privilege
- Trike: A threat modeling framework emphasizing stakeholder-defined risk
- VAST: Visual, Agile, and Simple Threat modeling
Choosing the Right Threat Modeling Solution
An ideal solution offers a robust set of features that includes:
- Scalability
- Automatic threat identification
- Suggested security controls
- Cloud integration
Threat Modeler | A Scalable Enterprise Threat Modeling Platform
ThreatModeler Intelligence Platform was created to address the shortcomings of data flow diagrams, bring threat modeling capabilities in-house, and make it scalable. The vision for ThreatModeler software is to be able to model ALL threats automatically, with no security expertise required. And we think we’ve done that.