Imagine being the ruler of a grand estate. There are sprawling bedrooms, towering walls, hundreds of windows and heavily guarded gates. However, that’s only what you were told. The chances of unexplored areas or underground tunnels being present are pretty high, and even the most secure buildings can have weak points.
The same principle applies to cybersecurity today. An organization’s digital assets form a modern-day fortress for malicious hackers, making it difficult for security teams to ignore.
An independent survey led by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), in partnership with Synack, revealed that 50% of organizations find discovering and managing their attack surface more difficult than 12 months ago. To make matters worse, you can’t pentest what you don’t know.
Fueled by various factors and industry trends like cloud computing, shadow IT, the decentralization of the workforce and the implementation of zero trust policies, security teams are struggling to keep up, creating concerns around risk exposure to sensitive data.
This is where attack surface management (ASM) comes into play. Considered a relatively newer term in the cybersecurity world, attack surface management is a strategy that involves discovering and monitoring assets and continuously identifying, assessing and mitigating potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors.
What makes an effective attack surface management strategy? Identifying existing operational setbacks is a good place to start.
Challenges with the Attack Surface Maze
Proper management of assets is essential. However, security teams often find themselves grappling with ongoing difficulties surrounding the asset management lifecycle and a lack of up-to-date tools to tackle a modern-day attack surface sprawl.
Lack of Visibility: In today’s dynamic IT environments, assets are frequently being added, removed or updated. Without an updated inventory of assets, security blind spots can proliferate and put an organization at increased risk, and attackers can easily target these unknown assets, exploiting vulnerabilities that the security team is unaware of.
Inability to Operationalize: With assets that security teams are aware of, many face some difficult questions: Which assets are most at risk for malicious activity, and how should we prioritize them? This inability to operationalize new or previously undiscovered assets often leads to inefficient resource allocation and delayed response times. Critical vulnerabilities may go unaddressed for extended periods, increasing the likelihood of a successful attack.
Integration with Security Testing Program: Without proper integration with asset management, security testing efforts may be incomplete or ineffective. Additionally, the results of security tests may not be communicated to the asset owners, causing delays and making it difficult to remediate identified vulnerabilities.
Gaps in Your Security Testing Armor
While various security testing methodologies exist today, many can’t keep up with expanding attack surfaces and evolving tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs).
Too Noisy: Many security testing tools, like automated scanners, generate an excessive volume of alerts, which most security teams don’t have time to sift through. It can be overwhelming and time consuming, on top of being a contributing factor to critical vulnerabilities taking longer to find and fix.
Lack of Tester Diversity: While automated vulnerability scans can be configured to run continuously, they are not a substitute for human expertise. Critical assets require diverse skill sets and perspectives that scans can’t offer, often failing to detect critical vulnerabilities, like broken access control, due to their reliance on predefined signatures and patterns. This can leave significant gaps in an organization’s security posture, potentially exposing them to exploitation by malicious actors.
High False Positive Rates: False positives are a common issue with many security testing tools. These alerts get flagged as potential vulnerabilities that, upon further investigation, turn out to be of lesser importance. High false positive rates can waste valuable time and resources, as security teams are forced to chase down phantom threats.
Synack: One Platform for Your Attack Surface Management Needs
If organizations want to stay ahead of the curve with an attack surface management strategy that’s built for continuous asset and vulnerability discovery, Synack is your go-to. Last year, Synack integrated external attack surface discovery (ASD) to its Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) platform solution. We’re helping customers streamline their workflows by identifying new vulnerable assets and closing gaps between asset discovery and PTaaS programs by reducing the time from discovery, triage, validation and remediation, all on one platform.
Continuous Discovery of Assets
Say goodbye to assets left in the dark. Security teams will finally get an answer to questions like, “How large is my attack surface?” Once a scan is generated, customers can proactively and continuously identify previously unknown or unaccounted-for internet-facing assets, including IP addresses, applications and Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs).
Know Which Assets Are Most At-Risk
Our ASD feature seamlessly integrates with Synack’s Asset Insights, automatically adding discovered assets to your Asset List for further fingerprinting and investigation. With Asset Insights, Synack customers can view all of their assets in one place and their associated risks, better-informing testing or re-testing decisions on new or existing assets.
Seamlessly Test Assets with the Assessment Creation Wizard
Our Assessment Creation Wizard (ACW) makes it easy for customers to create new penetration tests on discovered assets. Customers can spin up a test in days, not weeks. By eliminating the need for back-and-forth communication between pentesters and start times, customers can self-service all this information through guided forms and receive the same level of customization as they would in a guided conversation with traditional, on-site testers.
The Synack Red Team (SRT), our community of highly skilled and diverse security researchers, has the breadth of expertise organizations need and works to discover your most critical vulnerabilities. Once vulnerabilities are submitted through the client portal, our Vulnerability Operations team triages and verifies exploitability. Your team only spends valuable time and resources remediating what matters rather than sorting through endless, low-quality results. With customizable, compliance-ready reporting, recommended remediation steps and patch verification, teams can further streamline their attack surface management processes.
Get Started
If you’re interested in learning more about the Synack platform and how our continuous asset discovery and on-demand security testing capabilities can help build a stronger, more effective attack surface management strategy, request a demo today.
