Here’s a Path to Better Attack Surface Risk Management

So, how can security leaders stay on top of their attack surface and ahead of the bad guys? By leveraging a unified cybersecurity platform that enables continuous security visibility and monitoring across the discovery, assessment, and mitigation phases of the attack surface risk lifecycle. Let’s dive deeper into how a platform can enhance attack surface risk management versus utilizing point products.

Discover your digital attack surface

First, you need total visibility to be able to discover your attack surface. Siloed point products across endpoints, users, devices, cloud, networks, etc., limit overstretched security teams from taking stock and they don’t have time for a manual audit

Also consider that new projects with open source dependencies and user/device accounts are spun up instantly, meaning you need to be able to see your entire ecosystem as it changes, not after.

A cybersecurity platform with broad third-party integration allows security teams to view their entire ecosystem from one dashboard, saving valuable time and empowering them to better assess cyber risk.

Assessing your cyber risk

Being able to see your entire ecosystem as it changes is the first step; next, security teams need to assess and prioritize any weaknesses or vulnerabilities. This doesn’t just apply this to systems, but user types as well—for example, executive level employees are the most common targets for business email compromise (BEC). Also, we’ve seen an uptick in campaigns targeting software supply chains and DevOps pipelines, meaning processes also need to be evaluated for any security gaps.

As always, this needs to be an ongoing process. For example, user behavior can change mid-session and require access termination. A unified platform with deep, native integration across the enterprise enables organizations to implement a Zero Trust strategy, supporting the need to continuously verify and assess any users, applications, and devices with access to your IT infrastructure.

Unlike point products that end up with siloed data, a platform can continuously collect and correlate deep threat data across your attack surface (endpoints, networks, cloud, and email) to produce fewer, but higher-confidence alerts. This allows security teams to narrow-in on and prioritize critical or high severity cyber risks without time-consuming, manual cross-product correlation. It also enables organizations to address the detection and response requirements that modern cyber risk insurance policies are demanding today.

Mitigate risk

Finally, while discovering and assessing risks across your digital attack surface is important, it’s also important to receive remediation recommendations and be able to automate mitigation wherever possible. A unified platform with security controls across multiple environments can help to automate the mitigation of high priority risks, like the application of virtual patching capabilities to limit the scope of an attack and allow security teams to focus on further investigation. With the skills shortage introducing very real challenges to managing the attack surface, the ability to consolidate tools and leverage a unified platform can also help with risk mitigation.

Next steps

Better digital attack surface management starts with the right tooling: a unified cybersecurity platform with broad third-party integrations that seamlessly fits into your existing security stack. Consider a platform like Trend Micro One, backed by innovative security capabilities such as XDR, continuous threat monitoring, risk assessments, and automation to alleviate security teams, accelerate detection and response, and meet compliance and cyber insurance requirements.

To learn more about Trend Micro One platform capabilities click here, or check out the following resources for more insights into types of risk affecting enterprises: