Digital Risk Attack Surface Policy
In the realm of cybersecurity, a Digital Risk Attack Surface Policy is a set of guidelines and procedures designed to manage and reduce an organization's exposure to potential cyber threats. Here's a breakdown:
Key Concepts:
Attack Surface:
This refers to the total sum of all the points where an unauthorized user (attacker) can try to enter or extract data from an environment. This includes digital assets like:
Web applications
Networks
Cloud infrastructure
Devices
APIs
Digital Risk:
This encompasses the potential for harm or loss that an organization faces in its digital environment. This can include data breaches, financial losses, reputational damage, and disruption of services.
Policy:
In this context, a policy is a documented set of rules and procedures that an organization implements to achieve specific security objectives.
What a Digital Risk Attack Surface Policy Entails:
A comprehensive policy typically includes:
Asset Identification:
Defining and cataloging all digital assets that make up the organization's attack surface.
Risk Assessment:
Evaluating the potential vulnerabilities and threats associated with each asset.
Prioritizing risks based on their severity and likelihood.
Vulnerability Management:
Establishing procedures for detecting, patching, and mitigating vulnerabilities.
Access Control:
Implementing measures to restrict unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data.
Monitoring and Detection:
Continuously monitoring the attack surface for suspicious activity and potential threats.
Incident Response:
Developing a plan for responding to and recovering from cyber incidents.
Regular reviews and updates:
The digital landscape is constantly changing, so the policy needs to be reviewed and updated often.
Purpose:
The primary purpose of a Digital Risk Attack Surface Policy is to:
Minimize the organization's exposure to cyberattacks.
Reduce the potential impact of successful attacks.
Improve the organization's overall security posture.
Help organizations to maintain compliance with relevant security regulations.
In essence, it's about proactively managing and reducing the areas where an organization is vulnerable to cyber threats.
Here's an explanation of how ThreatNG helps with a Digital Risk Attack Surface Policy:
ThreatNG excels at external discovery. It can perform purely external unauthenticated discovery without needing connectors. This is crucial for an Attack Surface Policy because it allows organizations to see their digital footprint from an attacker's perspective. By identifying all external-facing assets, even those that might be unknown or forgotten, ThreatNG provides a comprehensive view of potential attack entry points.
ThreatNG provides detailed external assessments, which are crucial for evaluating and prioritizing risks within a Digital Risk Attack Surface Policy. Examples include:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: ThreatNG analyzes externally accessible parts of web applications to find potential entry points for attackers. This assessment helps organizations understand the risk of attackers taking control of their web applications.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: ThreatNG uses domain intelligence to evaluate the susceptibility of a website's subdomains to take over. This is important because subdomain takeovers can lead to significant damage, including phishing attacks and brand damage.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: ThreatNG derives this from sentiment, financials, domain intelligence, and dark web presence, giving organizations insight into their vulnerability to these prevalent attacks.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: ThreatNG uses attack surface intelligence, digital risk intelligence, ESG violations, sentiment, financials, and domain intelligence to assess the potential for brand damage. This helps organizations protect their reputation by identifying factors that could contribute to negative perceptions.
Data Leak Susceptibility: ThreatNG assesses this risk using external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, dark web presence, domain intelligence, and sentiment and financials. This is critical for protecting sensitive information and complying with data protection regulations.
Cyber Risk Exposure: ThreatNG considers domain intelligence parameters like certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, and sensitive ports to determine cyber risk exposure.
Code Secret Exposure: ThreatNG discovers code repositories and their exposure level and checks for sensitive data. This helps organizations prevent the unintentional exposure of sensitive information in code.
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: ThreatNG evaluates cloud services and SaaS solutions to identify potential risks associated with these environments.
Compromised Credentials: ThreatNG considers compromised credentials found on the dark web, which can increase the risk of successful attacks.
ESG Exposure: ThreatNG evaluates an organization's vulnerability to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks using external attack surface digital risk intelligence, sentiment, and Financials findings.
Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure: ThreatNG derives this from domain intelligence, technology stack, and cloud and SaaS exposure.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: ThreatNG calculates this based on external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, dark web presence, sentiment, and financials.
Mobile App Exposure: ThreatNG evaluates an organization's mobile app exposure by discovering them in marketplaces and analyzing their contents for access credentials, security credentials, and platform-specific identifiers. For example, it checks for the presence of API keys, passwords, and other sensitive information within the apps.
3. Reporting
ThreatNG provides various reporting options, including executive, technical, prioritized, security ratings, inventory, ransomware susceptibility, and U.S. SEC filings. These reports help organizations understand their risk posture, communicate it to stakeholders, and track progress over time, which is essential for demonstrating the effectiveness of the Digital Risk Attack Surface Policy.
ThreatNG continuously monitors external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings. This is vital for a Digital Risk Attack Surface Policy because it allows organizations to stay informed about changes in their risk posture and respond quickly to emerging threats.
ThreatNG includes investigation modules that provide detailed information for analyzing potential risks and incidents. Examples include:
Domain Intelligence: This module provides a domain overview, DNS intelligence, email intelligence, WHOIS intelligence, and subdomain intelligence. For instance, subdomain intelligence includes analyzing HTTP responses, header analysis, server headers, cloud hosting, and identifying content like admin pages, APIs, and potential vulnerabilities.
IP Intelligence: This module provides information on IPs, shared IPs, ASNs, country locations, and private IPs.
Certificate Intelligence: This module provides information on TLS certificates, their status, issuers, and associated organizations.
Social Media: This module analyzes organization-wide posts, including content, hashtags, links, and tags.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module discovers public code repositories and uncovers digital risks like exposed access credentials, security credentials, and configuration files. For example, it can detect exposed API keys, passwords in URIs, AWS credentials, and private SSH keys.
Mobile Application Discovery: This module discovers mobile apps in marketplaces and analyzes their contents for access credentials, security credentials, and platform-specific identifiers.
Search Engine Exploitation: This module helps investigate an organization’s susceptibility to exposing information via search engines by discovering website control files and analyzing the search engine attack surface.
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: This module identifies sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services, impersonations, exposed cloud buckets, and SaaS implementations. For example, it can locate exposed AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform buckets and SaaS implementations like Salesforce, Slack, and Zoom.
Online Sharing Exposure: This module identifies organizational entities within online code-sharing platforms.
Sentiment and Financials: This module provides information on organizational lawsuits, layoff chatter, SEC filings, and ESG violations.
Archived Web Pages: This module identifies various archived web pages related to the organization.
Dark Web Presence: This module identifies organizational mentions, associated ransomware events, and compromised credentials on the dark web.
Technology Stack: This module identifies the technologies used by the organization.
ThreatNG uses intelligence repositories, including data on the dark web, compromised credentials, ransomware events and groups, known vulnerabilities, ESG violations, bug bounty programs, SEC Form 8-Ks, and mobile apps. These repositories provide valuable context for assessing risks and prioritizing remediation efforts.
7. Working with Complementary Solutions
The document doesn't explicitly detail ThreatNG's integrations with complementary solutions. However, its comprehensive data and reporting capabilities suggest it can likely work alongside SIEM systems, vulnerability scanners, and other security tools. For example, ThreatNG's threat intelligence could feed into a SIEM to improve threat detection or its vulnerability data could be combined with a vulnerability scanner to prioritize remediation.
ThreatNG offers robust capabilities that directly support creating, implementing, and enforcing a Digital Risk Attack Surface Policy. Its external discovery, assessment, reporting, continuous monitoring, investigation modules, and intelligence repositories provide organizations with the visibility and insights needed to manage their digital risk effectively.
