GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance)
Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) in the context of cybersecurity is a comprehensive and integrated approach that organizations use to manage their overall cybersecurity posture. It ensures that security efforts are aligned with business objectives, cyber risks are effectively identified and mitigated, and the organization adheres to all relevant laws, regulations, and internal policies.
Here's a detailed breakdown of each component:
Governance: This pillar establishes the framework and strategic direction for cybersecurity within an organization. It involves defining and implementing cybersecurity strategies, policies, and organizational structures. Key aspects of governance include:
Strategic Alignment: Ensuring cybersecurity initiatives support and enable the organization's broader business goals and objectives.
Policy Development and Enforcement: Creating, communicating, and enforcing clear cybersecurity policies, standards, and procedures that guide employee behavior and technological implementation.
Roles and Responsibilities: Defining clear roles, responsibilities, and accountability for cybersecurity across all levels of the organization, from the board of directors to individual employees.
Resource Management: Allocating appropriate resources (financial, human, technological) to cybersecurity programs.
Performance Monitoring: Establishing metrics and reporting mechanisms to monitor the effectiveness of the cybersecurity program and report to leadership.
Security Culture: Fostering a security-aware culture throughout the organization.
Risk Management: This component focuses on the systematic identification, assessment, mitigation, and monitoring of cybersecurity risks. Its goal is to reduce the organization's exposure to cyber threats to an acceptable level. Key aspects of risk management include:
Risk Identification: Discovering potential cybersecurity threats (e.g., malware, phishing, insider threats) and vulnerabilities (e.g., software bugs, misconfigurations) that could impact the organization's information assets.
Risk Assessment: Evaluating the likelihood of a threat exploiting a vulnerability and the potential impact (financial, reputational, operational, legal) if such an event occurs. This often involves qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Risk Mitigation/Treatment: Implementing controls (technical, administrative, physical) to reduce identified risks. Examples include implementing firewalls, encryption, security awareness training, and incident response plans.
Risk Monitoring: Continuously tracking known risks, identifying new ones, and evaluating the effectiveness of implemented controls.
Incident Response and Recovery: Developing and practicing plans to respond to, contain, eradicate, and recover from cybersecurity incidents.
Compliance: This pillar ensures that the organization adheres to all applicable internal and external requirements related to cybersecurity. These requirements can stem from various sources. Key aspects of compliance include:
Regulatory Adherence: Conforming to external laws and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), and state-specific data privacy laws.
Industry Standards: Adhering to industry-specific best practices and frameworks like ISO 27001, NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), or SOC 2.
Internal Policies: Ensuring all business units and employees follow the organization's established cybersecurity policies and procedures.
Auditing and Reporting: Regularly conducting internal and external audits to demonstrate compliance, collect evidence of adherence, and report findings to relevant stakeholders and regulatory bodies.
Documentation: Maintaining comprehensive records of security controls, risk assessments, and compliance activities.
Integrating these three pillars — Governance, Risk, and Compliance — is crucial. GRC ensures that security decisions are guided by strategic objectives (Governance), prioritize the most significant threats (Risk Management), and meet all necessary legal and regulatory obligations (Compliance). This holistic approach helps organizations build a resilient cybersecurity posture, protect their assets, maintain trust, and avoid penalties or reputational damage.
ThreatNG, as an all-in-one external attack surface management, digital risk protection, and security ratings solution, offers comprehensive capabilities that directly support and enhance GRC in cybersecurity. It provides an "outside-in" evaluation of an organization's GRC posture, identifying exposed assets, critical vulnerabilities, and digital risks from an unauthenticated attacker's perspective. It maps these findings directly to relevant GRC frameworks. This enables organizations to proactively uncover and address external security and compliance gaps, strengthening their overall GRC standing.
ThreatNG's Role in GRC
1. External Discovery: ThreatNG's ability to perform purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors is crucial for GRC. This means it can identify an organization's digital footprint as an attacker would see it, without needing internal access or credentials. This unauthenticated discovery provides an accurate "outside-in" view, which is fundamental for GRC as it ensures all internet-facing assets are accounted for.
How ThreatNG Helps: ThreatNG automatically discovers an organization's internet-facing assets, including domains, subdomains, IP addresses, cloud services, and mobile applications. This helps establish a comprehensive asset inventory from an external perspective, a core component of effective cybersecurity governance.
GRC Example: A GRC team mandates a complete inventory of all public-facing assets. ThreatNG discovers an old, forgotten subdomain hosting an outdated application that is not in the internal asset register. This highlights a governance gap (lack of complete asset control) and a significant risk, which the GRC team must address to ensure all assets are under proper governance.
2. External Assessment: ThreatNG performs a wide range of external assessments that directly feed into GRC evaluations by highlighting potential risks and compliance issues.
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility:
How ThreatNG Helps: ThreatNG analyzes parts of a web application accessible from the outside world to identify potential entry points for attackers, substantiated by external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, including Domain Intelligence.
GRC Example: ThreatNG identifies an exposed administrative interface of a public-facing web application with weak authentication. This directly impacts compliance with secure coding standards (e.g., OWASP Top 10 A2 for broken authentication) and represents a significant data confidentiality and integrity risk. The GRC team would then mandate immediate remediation and a review of web application security policies.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility:
How ThreatNG Helps: ThreatNG evaluates subdomain takeover susceptibility by analyzing a website's subdomains, DNS records, SSL certificate statuses, and other relevant factors using external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, incorporating Domain Intelligence.
GRC Example: ThreatNG discovers an orphaned DNS record pointing to a de-provisioned cloud service, making a critical subdomain susceptible to takeover. The GRC team would identify this as a significant risk (potential for reputational damage, phishing vector) and a governance failure (poor asset de-provisioning process), requiring immediate DNS record cleanup and policy updates for compliance.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility:
How ThreatNG Helps: This is derived from Sentiment and Financials Findings, Domain Intelligence (including DNS Intelligence capabilities like Domain Name Permutations and Web3 Domains, and Email Intelligence that provides email security presence and format prediction), and Dark Web Presence (Compromised Credentials).
GRC Example: ThreatNG flags many harvested organizational emails on the dark web and identifies weak DMARC, SPF, or DKIM records through its Email Intelligence capabilities. This directly impacts compliance with email security best practices and signals a high risk of successful phishing campaigns, which could lead to data breaches and regulatory non-compliance. The GRC team would enforce stronger email authentication policies and user security awareness training.
How ThreatNG Helps: Derived from attack surface intelligence, digital risk intelligence, ESG Violations, Sentiment and Financials (Lawsuits, SEC filings, SEC Form 8-Ks, and Negative News), and Domain Intelligence (Domain Name Permutations and Web3 Domains that are available and taken).
GRC Example: ThreatNG detects multiple instances of brand impersonation on newly registered domain permutations. This GRC concern for brand protection and reputation management requires legal action or domain acquisition to mitigate risk and ensure compliance with brand protection policies.
How ThreatNG Helps: This is derived from external attack surface and digital risk intelligence based on Cloud and SaaS Exposure, Dark Web Presence (Compromised Credentials), Domain Intelligence (DNS Intelligence capabilities which include Domain Name Permutations and Web3 Domains that are available and taken; and Email Intelligence that provides email security presence and format prediction), and Sentiment and Financials (Lawsuits and SEC Form 8-Ks).
GRC Example: ThreatNG reveals an open AWS S3 bucket containing sensitive customer data. This is a severe compliance violation (e.g., GDPR Article 32 on security of processing, HIPAA Security Rule) and a significant data breach risk, demanding immediate GRC intervention to secure the bucket and report the incident if necessary, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations.
How ThreatNG Helps: ThreatNG considers parameters from its Domain Intelligence module, including certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, and sensitive ports, to determine cyber risk exposure. Code Secret Exposure, which discovers code repositories and their exposure level and investigates their contents for sensitive data, is also factored into the score. Cloud and SaaS Exposure evaluates cloud services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. Additionally, the score considers the organization's compromised credentials on the dark web, which increases the risk of successful attacks.
GRC Example: ThreatNG identifies a publicly exposed database with an open sensitive port and a critical CVE. This directly maps to a high-severity risk in the GRC framework, requiring an immediate patch and firewall rule implementation to reduce the attack surface and maintain compliance with vulnerability management policies.
How ThreatNG Helps: ThreatNG rates the organization based on discovered environmental, social, and governance (ESG) violations through its external attack surface and digital risk intelligence findings, analyzing areas such as Competition, Consumer, Employment, Environment, Financial, Government Contracting, Healthcare, and Safety-related offenses.
GRC Example: ThreatNG identifies publicly available legal filings or negative news related to an environmental violation by a subsidiary. This directly flags an ESG compliance and reputational risk that the GRC team must monitor and potentially address in their public disclosures, ensuring compliance with evolving ESG reporting requirements.
Supply Chain & Third Party Exposure:
How ThreatNG Helps: Derived from Domain Intelligence (Enumeration of Vendor Technologies from DNS and Subdomains), Technology Stack, and Cloud and SaaS Exposure.
GRC Example: ThreatNG discovers that the organization's critical third-party vendor has a publicly exposed, unpatched server. This immediately flags a third-party risk within the GRC framework, prompting the organization to reassess the vendor's security posture and potentially re-evaluate the partnership based on compliance requirements and supply chain risk management policies.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility:
How ThreatNG Helps: This is calculated based on external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, including domain intelligence (exposed sensitive ports, exposed private IPs, and known vulnerabilities), dark web presence (compromised credentials and ransomware events and gang activity), and sentiment and financials (SEC Form 8-Ks).
GRC Example: ThreatNG detects the organization has many compromised credentials on the dark web and identifies recent ransomware gang activity targeting similar organizations. This high susceptibility directly informs the GRC team's incident response planning and mandates increased investment in preventative controls, reflecting risk management best practices and compliance with incident preparedness mandates.
How ThreatNG Helps: ThreatNG evaluates an organization’s mobile app exposure by discovering them in marketplaces and analyzing their content for access credentials, security credentials, and platform-specific identifiers.
GRC Example: ThreatNG identifies an organization's mobile app in a public marketplace that contains hardcoded API keys. This is a severe security flaw and a non-compliance issue with secure application development policies, requiring the GRC team to enforce code reviews and secure coding practices across their mobile development lifecycle.
How ThreatNG Helps: ThreatNG identifies and highlights an organization's security strengths, detecting the presence of beneficial security controls and configurations, such as Web Application Firewalls or multi-factor authentication, and validating these positive measures from the perspective of an external attacker.
GRC Example: ThreatNG confirms that a Web Application Firewall (WAF) effectively mitigates common web attack vectors for a critical application. This provides positive assurance for GRC reporting, demonstrating the effectiveness of implemented controls and supporting compliance with application security requirements.
3. Reporting: ThreatNG offers various reporting capabilities, including Executive, Technical, Prioritized (High, Medium, Low, and Informational), Security Ratings, Inventory, Ransomware Susceptibility, U.S. SEC Filings, and External GRC Assessment Mappings (e.g., PCI DSS). These reports are essential for GRC teams to communicate findings to stakeholders, prioritize remediation efforts, and demonstrate compliance with specific frameworks.
How ThreatNG Helps: The ability to map findings directly to GRC frameworks like PCI DSS significantly streamlines the assessment process and provides clear, actionable insights for compliance. The prioritized reports help GRC teams allocate resources effectively by focusing on the most critical risks.
GRC Example: A GRC manager must report on the organization's PCI DSS compliance status. ThreatNG's "External GRC Assessment Mappings (eg, PCI DSS)" report highlights any external non-compliance issues, such as an exposed sensitive port. This allows the manager to quickly present specific compliance gaps and remediation plans to auditors and senior management.
4. Continuous Monitoring: ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of all organizations' external attack surfaces, digital risks, and security ratings.
How ThreatNG Helps: Continuous monitoring is critical for GRC because the threat landscape and an organization's attack surface are constantly evolving. This ensures that new vulnerabilities or compliance gaps are identified promptly, allowing continuous adherence to GRC requirements rather than relying solely on point-in-time assessments.
GRC Example: A development team inadvertently exposes a testing environment to the internet overnight. ThreatNG's continuous monitoring immediately detects this new asset and any associated vulnerabilities, allowing the GRC team to respond swiftly before it becomes a major incident or audit finding. Thus, compliance breaches are prevented, and ongoing adherence to security policies is ensured.
5. Investigation Modules: ThreatNG's investigation modules offer deep insights into various aspects of an organization's external posture. These insights are invaluable for GRC teams to understand the root cause of risks and address them effectively.
How ThreatNG Helps: Provides a comprehensive overview of an organization's digital presence, including Domain Overview, DNS Intelligence, Email Intelligence, WHOIS Intelligence, and detailed Subdomain Intelligence.
GRC Example: A GRC team reviewing a potential phishing susceptibility flag uses Domain Intelligence's DNS Intelligence and Email Intelligence. They discover misconfigured SPF records and multiple "sister" domains (domain permutations) registered by malicious actors. This detailed insight allows the GRC team to mandate immediate DNS record correction and initiate legal action against the malicious domains, strengthening governance over digital brand assets.
How ThreatNG Helps: Discovers public code repositories, uncovering digital risks that include Access Credentials (API Keys, Access Tokens, Generic Credentials), Cloud Credentials, Security Credentials (Cryptographic Keys), Other Secrets, Configuration Files, Database Exposures, Application Data Exposures, Activity Records, Communication Platform Configurations, Development Environment Configurations, Security Testing Tools, Cloud Service Configurations, Remote Access Credentials, System Utilities, Personal Data, and User Activity.
GRC Example: ThreatNG's Code Repository Exposure module reveals hardcoded AWS Access Key IDs in a public GitHub repository. This critical GRC finding violates secure development policies and could lead to unauthorized access to cloud resources. The GRC team would then enforce secret management policies and thoroughly review all public code, ensuring compliance with data security and access control regulations.
How ThreatNG Helps: Identifies Sanctioned Cloud Services, Unsanctioned Cloud Services, Cloud Service Impersonations, and Open Exposed Cloud Buckets of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It also covers various SaaS implementations.
GRC Example: ThreatNG discovers an unsanctioned SaaS application used by a department or an open S3 bucket on a public cloud provider. This is a direct GRC concern related to shadow IT and data protection, prompting the GRC team to enforce cloud governance policies and data access controls, ensuring compliance with data residency and privacy requirements.
How ThreatNG Helps: Identifies organizational mentions of Related or Defined People, Places, or Things, Associated Ransomware Events, and Associated Compromised Credentials.
GRC Example: ThreatNG identifies many compromised employee credentials or mentions of the organization by ransomware gangs on the dark web. This information is critical for the GRC team's risk assessment, triggering an immediate review of internal security controls and potentially mandating multi-factor authentication across the organization to comply with security best practices and prevent account takeovers.
6. Intelligence Repositories (DarCache): Contextualizing GRC Risks ThreatNG's continuously updated intelligence repositories, branded as DarCache, provide critical context for GRC risk assessments.
Dark Web (DarCache Dark Web), Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture), Ransomware Groups and Activities (DarCache Ransomware): Tracking over 70 Ransomware Gangs.
How ThreatNG Helps: This intelligence directly informs GRC on real-world threats and potential breaches, allowing for proactive measures and compliance with breach reporting requirements.
GRC Example: If ThreatNG's DarCache Dark Web and DarCache Ransomware indicate a surge in activity by a ransomware group known to exploit a specific vulnerability the organization has (as identified by ThreatNG's assessments), the GRC team can immediately escalate the risk rating of that vulnerability and prioritize its remediation, ensuring proactive risk management in line with regulatory expectations.
Vulnerabilities (DarCache Vulnerability): This provides a holistic and proactive approach to managing external risks and vulnerabilities by understanding their real-world exploitability, likelihood of exploitation, and potential impact. It includes NVD (DarCache NVD), EPSS (DarCache EPSS), KEV (DarCache KEV), and Verified Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Exploits (DarCache eXploit).
How ThreatNG Helps: This data provides a deep understanding of each vulnerability's technical characteristics, potential impact, likelihood of exploitation, and active exploitation status. This enables GRC teams to make smarter security decisions and allocate resources effectively.
GRC Example: ThreatNG's DarCache KEV identifies that a critical vulnerability on a public-facing server (detected by ThreatNG's External Assessment) is actively exploited in the wild. The GRC team can use this intelligence to justify immediate emergency patching and resource allocation, demonstrating a strong risk response capability for audit purposes and ensuring compliance with vulnerability management policies. ThreatNG's DarCache EPSS showing a high probability of exploitation for a specific CVE would prompt the GRC team to prioritize patching over a CVE with a similar CVSS score but lower EPSS, aligning risk management with real-world threat intelligence.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external focus creates powerful synergies with other internal-facing cybersecurity and GRC tools:
Complementary Solutions: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Systems
Synergy Example: ThreatNG identifies an exposed critical service on the internet. This external intelligence is fed into the SIEM. If the SIEM then detects unusual traffic patterns or brute-force login attempts originating from external sources targeting that exposed service, the correlation of external exposure (from ThreatNG) and internal activity (from SIEM) allows for a higher-fidelity alert and faster, more informed incident response. The GRC team benefits from this combined view, as it provides stronger evidence of continuous monitoring and effective incident detection, crucial for demonstrating compliance.
Complementary Solutions: Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Platforms
Synergy Example: ThreatNG's detailed External GRC Assessment Mappings for frameworks like PCI DSS or NIST CSF can be directly imported into a dedicated GRC platform. For instance, if ThreatNG identifies a non-compliant finding (e.g., an open sensitive port violating a PCI DSS requirement), this finding automatically populates the risk register within the GRC platform, linking it to the specific control. This streamlines audit preparation, risk tracking, and compliance reporting, centralizing all GRC-related data for comprehensive oversight.
Complementary Solutions: Vulnerability Management (VM) Solutions
Synergy Example: ThreatNG's external vulnerability findings, enriched with NVD, EPSS, and KEV data from DarCache, can be prioritized and fed into an internal VM solution. If ThreatNG flags a high-severity, actively exploited (KEV) vulnerability on a public-facing web server, the VM solution can then prioritize its internal scanning and patching activities on that specific asset, ensuring that the most critical external risks are addressed first, aligning with risk mitigation strategies in GRC.
Complementary Solutions: Identity and Access Management (IAM) Systems
Synergy Example: When ThreatNG's Dark Web Presence module identifies compromised credentials associated with the organization, this information can be pushed to an IAM system. The IAM system can then automatically trigger mandatory password resets for the affected accounts or enforce multi-factor authentication, directly mitigating the risk of account takeover and strengthening access controls, which are core GRC components.
Complementary Solutions: Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms
Synergy Example: If ThreatNG detects a critical data leak (e.g., sensitive configuration files exposed on a public online sharing platform), this alert can initiate an automated playbook in a SOAR platform. The SOAR platform could then automatically alert the responsible team, create a remediation ticket, notify legal and GRC stakeholders, and potentially initiate a takedown request, automating much of the incident response process and ensuring prompt compliance actions.
By combining ThreatNG's unique external perspective with the internal visibility and process automation of complementary solutions, organizations can achieve a more robust and proactive cybersecurity posture, significantly strengthening their overall GRC standing.
