The benefits of automated attack surface management

Can safety groups sustain with assault floor dangers with out automated processes? Survey knowledge 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 research the invention knowledge, 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 not possible with guide or disconnected processes. Contemplate how usually somebody installs a service or deploys an asset linked to your community and the broader web. Each time they do, your group’s assault floor grows.

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

Even identified and correctly configured property can put your group vulnerable to cyberattacks when certificates expire, or property find yourself unpatched. Each safety skilled can acknowledge no less than a few of these challenges, and most organizations are house to a whole lot of attackable property.

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

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

Nevertheless, within the race in opposition to menace actors, time is one other enemy. Contemplate the next:

Ten hours is all it takes for a hacker to search 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 preliminary breach, a mean hacker can transfer laterally inside a corporation’s community.

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

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 in the event you turn into a goal for a complicated cybercriminal group.

Can your workforce uncover your evolving community assault pathways and resolve which of them to remediate on this timeframe? Can they achieve this constantly? It takes greater 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 deal with 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 good thing about automation is the flexibility it offers safety groups to type by way of huge databases of knowledge and take clever, automated actions quicker. 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 Safety Randori Recon can ship actionable perception in real-time.

Automating assault floor administration has 4 key steps:

Asset discovery: Automating the invention of internet-facing {hardware}, software program and cloud property that might act as entry factors for a hacker. An automatic instrument can quickly assess the chance that an asset is linked to a community.

Classification and prioritization: property cataloged throughout discovery and investigating them primarily based 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.

Remediation: Armed with context from the earlier two phases, safety groups will be extra environment friendly of their remediation efforts.

Monitoring: Automation makes steady monitoring potential. An automatic instrument may give safety groups a real-time view of adjustments of their group’s danger from the attitude 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 viewpoint. The place are the community entry factors? How straightforward are they to use? Which of them are going to be attacked first?

Handbook processes make it not possible to reply these questions earlier than menace actors do. Automation, alternatively, is a shortcut to speedy perception. Automating ASM with IBM Safety Randori Recon helps safety groups acquire real-time perception into dynamic assault surfaces and see themselves from an attacker’s viewpoint.

Find out how your group can profit from IBM Safety Randori Recon and join a free Assault Floor Evaluation