Attack Surface Management: Process, Functions and Challenges
Attack surface management (ASM) reduces exposure of your organization to
external threat actors, prevents data breaches and
helps comply with cybersecurity laws.
Introduction
Attack surface management (ASM) is a proactive cybersecurity strategy focused on identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers. It involves continuously monitoring and managing an organization's digital footprint to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. In this guide you will learn about ASM processes, functions and features and learn how ImmuniWeb can help you enhance your ASM activities.
Want to have an in-depth understanding of all modern aspects of Attack Surface Management? Read carefully this article and bookmark it to get back later, we regularly update this page.
| At ImmuniWeb, to attain the best possible outcomes and effectiveness of ASM, we consolidate advanced OSINT discovery with proactive Dark Web Monitoring augmented with our award-winning AI and Machine Learning technology to locate actionable information amid petabytes of raw data. Learn more about ASM with ImmuniWeb Discovery |  |
What is Attack Surface?
Starting from 2018, Gartner urges organizations to reduce and monitor their “attack surface” exposure. Put it simple, your attack surface is an aggregate of hardware, software and cloud assets accessible from the Internet that process or store your data. Also known as external attack surface or digital attack surface, this emerging trend starts populating the key priorities of CIO, CTO and CISO in 2024 and will certainly pursue its rapid expansion in 2025.
The larger the attack surface, the greater the risk of a successful cyberattack. That's why organizations invest heavily in ASM cybersecurity to identify, assess, and mitigate these vulnerabilities.
What is Attack Surface Management (ASM)?
Attack surface management is a cybersecurity process that involves continuously identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and mitigating vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors across an organization's IT environment. Essentially, it's about understanding and controlling all the possible entry points for a cyberattack.
Nearly all contemporary compliances, regulatory standards and data protection laws, including various NIST frameworks, PCI DSS, GDPR and HIPAA, requisite continuous ASM in one form or another. Proper implementation of the latter can likewise significantly simplify adoption of ISO 27001 and related international standards from the ISO 2700x family.
The Role of Attack Surface Management in Cybersecurity
Stealth security threats grow even more rapidly than booming M&A market, delivering concealed time-bombs to new business owners. Timely identification of shadow and legacy digital assets, as well as adequate security maintenance and protection of your known digital assets, considerably reduce data breaches and undermine attackers’ chances to silently compromise your organization. Moreover, ASM security is a key to successful Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) program and the concomitant efforts, from vulnerability remediation to threat intelligence.
Attack surface management helps prevent and mitigate the following risks stemming from:
- Shadow and legacy assets
- Human mistake and omissions
- Vulnerable and outdated software
- Unknown Open-Source Software (OSS)
- Large-scale attacks on your industry
- Targeted attacks on your business
- Intellectual property infringement
- IT heritage from M&A activities
| At ImmuniWeb, our multirole ImmuniWeb Discovery dashboard with 2FA allows you adding as many people as necessary, label and organize assets by all available properties from asset type to security risk or ownership. The data can be easily accessed by an API and integrated into other systems in line with your DevSecOps processes or threat intelligence taskforce. Learn more about ASM with ImmuniWeb Discovery |  |
Main ASM Challenges
ASM is a complex task fraught with several challenges. Here are some of the most common ones:
Rapidly Expanding Attack Surface
- Cloud adoption: The increasing use of cloud services exponentially grows the attack surface.
- IoT devices: The proliferation of IoT devices creates new vulnerabilities.
- Digital transformation: Organizations are constantly adopting new technologies, expanding their attack surface.
Visibility and Discovery
- Shadow IT: Unmanaged IT resources can be difficult to identify.
- Complex IT environments: Modern IT infrastructures are often intricate and challenging to map.
- Third-party risk: Assessing the security posture of third-party vendors is complex.
Prioritization
- Risk assessment: Determining the criticality of vulnerabilities can be subjective.
- Resource allocation: Balancing security investments across various threats is challenging.
- Constant change: Threat landscape evolves rapidly, requiring constant reassessment.
Remediation
- Resource constraints: Limited security teams and budgets can hinder remediation efforts.
- Complex patches: Applying patches can disrupt operations and introduce new vulnerabilities.
- Vendor dependencies: Relying on third-party vendors for fixes can be time-consuming.
Continuous Monitoring
- Alert fatigue: Overwhelming volume of alerts can lead to missed critical threats.
- False positives: Incorrectly identifying threats can waste valuable time and resources.
- Automation challenges: Automating monitoring processes can be complex and error-prone.
Integration with Existing Tools
- Data silos: Different security tools often have incompatible data formats.
- Tool sprawl: Managing multiple security tools can be inefficient.
- Automation challenges: Integrating tools for automated workflows can be complex.
Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive ASM strategy that combines technology, processes, and people.
| At ImmuniWeb, we leverage our award-winning ImmuniWeb Discovery security ratings technology to assign a Hackability and Attractiveness scores to all of the discovered applications and APIs, providing data-driven and easily-consumable insights. Learn more about ASM with ImmuniWeb Discovery |  |
Core Functions of Attack Surface Management
ASM is a crucial component of modern cybersecurity. Its core functions can be broken down into five key areas:
- Asset discovery
- Asset inventory and classification
- Asset risk scoring and security ratings
- Asset security monitoring
- Malicious asset and incident monitoring
By effectively executing these core functions, organizations can significantly reduce their attack surface and improve their overall security posture.
Asset Discovery
This initial stage is essential for proper and holistic implementation of cyberattack surface management in your organization. Its eventual purpose is to discover all external, or in other words Internet-facing, digital assets that contain or process your corporate data. The assets can be owned or operated by your organization, as well as by trusted third-parties such as cloud providers, IaaS and SaaS vendors, business partners, suppliers or external consultants. Below is a non-exhaustive list of digital assets that you should consider identifying and mapping within your asset discovery process:
- Mobile applications and their backends
- Web applications, Web Services and APIs
- Cloud and NAS storages, network devices
- Domain names and SSL certificates
- IoT and connected objects
- Public Code Repositories
- Email servers
The discovery process ranges from simple scanning of the provided IP addresses and subnetworks to more comprehensive OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) and Dark Web crawling. Some cybersecurity vendors offer to enhance the process by installation of client-side agents on your devices, however, it is quite time-consuming and often impractical. It is likewise imperative to consider digital assets of third parties that process, transmit or store your data.
Asset Inventory and Classification
Once your assets are known and visible, it’s the right timing to commence digital asset inventory and classification, also known as IT asset inventory. This part of the exercise involves dispatching and labeling of the assets based on their type, technical characteristics and properties, business criticality, compliance requirements or responsible team.
It is essential to nominate a person, or a team, accountable for regular asset maintenance, updates and protection. Unclear or dual responsibility inevitably leads to a wide spectrum of omissions and failures, eventually causing costly data breaches. Therefore, coherent and transparent responsibility for each asset, or group of assets, underpin the very substance of appropriate cyberattack surface management.
| At ImmuniWeb, we have put in place in our non-intrusive and production-safe technology for continuous Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with embedded Open-Source Security module, PCI DSS and GDPR compliance scanning enhanced with over 1,000 of tests from industry best practices and guidelines. Learn more about ASM with ImmuniWeb Discovery | |
Asset Risk Scoring and Security Ratings
Attack surface risk management would be a burdensome and arduous task without an actionable risk scoring component. Many organizations have thousands, with millions, of fluctuating digital assets. Common CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Development) approach to software development relentlessly adds new applications, servers and other systems into your external attack surface perimeter, oftentimes riddled with dangerous security vulnerabilities or even exposing confidential data without password protection, nor any other security mechanism.
Hence, the dynamic multiplicity of new digital assets shall be rapidly detected, scanned and scored for a subsequent risk mitigation in a threat-aware and priority-based manner. It is crucial to accurately assign security ratings to ensure prudent allocation of scarce IT resources and human time to tackle the most important cyber perils in right priority and without delay.
Asset Security Monitoring
Continuous security monitoring stands atop of ASM security stages related to corporate or trusted third-parties’ digital assets. According to Gartner, over 90% of the successfully exploited vulnerabilities have been publicly disclosed and known since over a year. Swift proliferation of Open-Source Software (OSS) complicates vulnerability management, bringing dozens of easily exploitable vulnerabilities every day.
Therefore, it is indispensable to effectuate a 24/7 monitoring of your digital assets for newly discovered security vulnerabilities, weaknesses, misconfigurations and derivative compliance issues. This component of ASM is particularly tricky to run in a smooth and production-safe mode. Many web vulnerability scanning tools and network security scanners may trigger an exploitation of SQL injection or Remote Command Execution (RCE) vulnerability thereby crushing the remote system or making it unavailable. For obvious reasons, such collateral effect is flatly unacceptable when dealing with third-party or business-critical systems. Therefore, pay attention to reliability and consistency of testing when considering a solution for continuous security monitoring integrated into your attack surface monitoring platform.
Malicious Asset and Incident Monitoring
The foregoing steps encompass known and unknown digital assets operated by your organization or authorized third parties. Importantly, the modern threat landscape transcends the realm of legitimate corporate IT assets and embodies malicious or rogue assets perfidiously deployed by cybercriminals or unscrupulous competitors.
This peculiar type of digital assets involves phishing websites, breached resources hosting exploit packs with ransomware, cybersquatted and typosquatted domain names, mobile apps pretending to be yours, fake accounts in social networks and similar digital creatures purported to infect, defraud or steal your customers abusing your trademarks or exploiting your goodwill. Read more about the state of stolen credentials in the dark web from Fortune 500 companies. The data is further exploited for spear-phishing campaigns, password reuse and brute-forcing attacks, often immensely efficient and successful. For these reasons, continuous monitoring for malicious assets and incidents is vital to ensure holistic visibility of attack vectors against your organization.
| At ImmuniWeb, we enhance attack surface management with dark web monitoring. We provide our clientele with up2date insights about existing and emerging threats to mitigate their impact and minimize the damages. Learn more about ASM with ImmuniWeb Discovery | |
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