The benefits of automated attack surface management

Can safety groups sustain with assault floor dangers with out automated processes? Survey information signifies that the reply isn’t any.

In a 2023 survey of IT and cybersecurity professionals, almost three-quarters (72%) mentioned assault floor discovery alone takes greater than 40 person-hours to finish. That doesn’t embody the extra time it takes for safety groups to investigate the invention information, prioritize actions and mitigate dangers. In the meantime, almost two-thirds (62%) of organizations mentioned their assault floor grew over the previous two years.

To maintain tempo with assault floor dangers, extra organizations want to make use of automated instruments. Right here’s why.

Handbook assault floor administration prices time

Staying forward of an increasing enterprise assault floor is sort of unimaginable with guide or disconnected processes. Contemplate how typically somebody installs a service or deploys an asset related to your community and the broader web. Each time they do, your group’s assault floor grows.

Many of those belongings are poorly configured from the purpose of preliminary deployment. Others, like unauthorized SaaS instruments and private accounts, are unknown to your IT crew within the first place. The standard firm has around 30% more belongings related to its community than its safety crew is aware of about.

Even recognized and correctly configured belongings can put your group prone to cyberattacks when certificates expire, or belongings find yourself unpatched. Each safety skilled can acknowledge at the least a few of these challenges, and most organizations are house to a whole bunch of attackable belongings.

A 2022 analysis of Fortune 500 companies discovered that the typical group has round 476 frequent vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) in its exterior assault floor. Attackers are conscious of this truth. They scan company networks for attackable belongings that host CVEs and sometimes discover them.

To seek out assault floor dangers earlier than the dangerous guys do, safety groups additionally search for these potential assault vectors. A company’s safety crew would possibly analyze certificates transparency logs or brute drive domains related to their networks to find what’s on the market.

Nonetheless, within the race towards menace actors, time is one other enemy. Contemplate the next:

• Ten hours is all it takes for a hacker to seek out an exploitable vulnerability in a corporation’s assault floor.
• 5 hours later, most hackers will exploit that vulnerability and obtain community entry.
• One and a half hours after the initial breach, a mean hacker can transfer laterally inside a corporation’s community.

These findings are based mostly on real-world, moral and felony hacker exercise and present how weak your group could also be from an attacker’s perspective.

In round 16 hours, an “common” menace actor can scan your assault floor, discover an attackable asset, compromise it and begin shifting round your community. This timeline is probably going even shorter if you happen to grow to be a goal for a complicated cybercriminal group.

Can your crew uncover your evolving community assault pathways and resolve which of them to remediate on this timeframe? Can they accomplish that repeatedly? It takes more than 80 hours for the typical group to construct an image of their assault floor and solely 26% of organizations carry out steady assault floor administration. Sadly, most organizations proceed to depend on disparate instruments, spreadsheets and guide processes, which aren’t scalable to handle rising assault surfaces.

Automate assault floor administration in 4 steps

Automation dramatically shortens the time it takes for defenders to know and act on assault floor dangers. The core cybersecurity advantage of automation is the power it provides safety groups to type by huge databases of knowledge and take clever, automated actions sooner. It takes a very long time to find and perceive an assault floor, however by automating asset discovery and aiding prioritization, an automatic assault floor administration (ASM) platform like IBM Security Randori Recon can ship actionable perception in real-time.

Automating assault floor administration has 4 key steps:

1. Asset discovery: Automating the invention of internet-facing {hardware}, software program and cloud belongings that might act as entry factors for a hacker. An automatic software can quickly assess the probability that an asset is related to a community.
2. Classification and prioritization: belongings cataloged throughout discovery and investigating them based mostly on how they’re uncovered, why they’re uncovered and the way possible they’re to be attacked. Past telling you that an asset hosts a vulnerability, automated instruments can present you the chance {that a} explicit asset will put you in danger.
3. Remediation: Armed with context from the earlier two phases, safety groups could be extra environment friendly of their remediation efforts.
4. Monitoring: Automation makes steady monitoring doable. An automatic software can provide safety groups a real-time view of adjustments of their group’s danger from the angle of a menace actor.

Begin automating assault floor administration with IBM Safety Randori Recon

Assault floor administration (ASM) is a technique of asking questions on your assault floor from an offensive safety perspective. The place are the community entry factors? How simple are they to use? Which of them are going to be attacked first?

Handbook processes make it unimaginable to reply these questions earlier than menace actors do. Automation, then again, is a shortcut to speedy perception. Automating ASM with IBM Security Randori Recon helps safety groups achieve real-time perception into dynamic assault surfaces and see themselves from an attacker’s perspective.

Learn how your organization can benefit from IBM Security Randori Recon and sign up for a free Attack Surface Review