Attack surface discovery is a crucial component of any organization’s cyber security strategy, allowing teams to identify potential entry points – also known as attack vectors – that could present a cyber threat. Without proper attack surface management, organizations risk exposure to breaches in systems, devices, and the overall network.
Attack surface management is unique because it’s performed from the hacker’s perspective, offering a unique insight into potential security risks that could jeopardize an organization. There are two types of attack surfaces that attack surface discovery helps manage: physical and digital attack surfaces.
Understanding the different attack surfaces and how attack surface discovery can effectively prevent these threats is crucial to protecting your organization. But what do the different types of attack surfaces entail, and how can ASD help prevent them? Read more to find out!
What is a Physical Attack Surface?
A physical attack surface describes physical entry points where hackers can breach your organization’s system. This surface includes attacks on your data centers, equipment, and physical facilities.
For instance, a physical attack surface would consist of access control systems throughout your organization, including keycards and cameras. Employee workstations are another example of a physical attack surface that could be a point of entry for hackers, including each employee’s desktop, mobile devices, and other equipment used within the organization.
These surfaces present a potential cyber threat; targeting these devices could lead to information theft and damage to an organization’s integrity and infrastructure.
What is a Digital Attack Surface?
A digital attack surface is also important for effective attack surface reduction. These surfaces include your organization’s hardware, software, and network, vulnerable to hackers and cyberattacks.
These attacks involve elements like your organization’s web applications that use databases, network components like switches, routers, and firewalls, and your application programming interfaces. Digital attack surfaces also include your organization’s device endpoints, such as any devices connected to a vulnerable network that hackers can access.
How Does ASD Help Prevent Attack Surface Breaches?
A thorough vulnerability assessment is critical to mitigating threats from different attack surfaces. Attack surface discovery helps promote attack surface reduction in several ways, allowing businesses to pursue a strategic method of preventing harmful cyberattacks and threats. Below are some specific ways that ASD helps prevent breaches through attack surfaces.
ASD Establishes Compliance
Attack surface discovery allows organizations to establish compliance and regulatory standards, contributing to a more secure environment and infrastructure. Proper attack surface management efforts help lower attack surface risks by offering guidelines for how employees can effectively identify and reduce risks across different entry points.
Attack surface management and discovery also provide employees with protocols to follow during a breach, ensuring everyone is prepared to address cyber threats and respond efficiently if something goes wrong. An attack surface discovery service can provide the resources necessary to establish compliance, incorporating effective policies and automation to promote a more secure environment and protect your entry points.
ASD Enhances Surface Visibility
Attack surface discovery effectively addresses each cyber threat by promoting visibility into your organization’s security infrastructure and vulnerable entry points, allowing you to monitor your infrastructure and quickly assess any breaches or potential threats.
Attack surface management uses internal and external resources to identify details like system users, cloud storage, IP addresses, internet-facing domains, containers, and more across your network – ensuring you know everything in your environment in real time.
ASD Promotes Asset Inventory
Proper attack surface management promotes asset inventory to automatically scan and identify physical and digital entry points that hackers could exploit to access your system. Assets that attack surface discovery, protect, and automatically assess include:
- Unknown assets, such as shadow IT. This asset involves software and hardware deployed on your organization’s network without your IT team’s knowledge and administrative oversight. An example of an unknown asset would be personal websites or applications accessing your organization’s network.
- Known assets involve all the resources your organization is actively managing. These assets include your servers, company-issued devices, applications, routers, and more.
- Subsidiary assets are known, unknown, and third-party assets belonging to a subsidiary organization’s network. These assets become part of your organization in a merger or acquisition.
- Third-party assets or vendor assets. These assets are assets that your organization does not own but that are included in your IT infrastructure. Third-party assets include services like SaaS applications.
- Malicious or rogue assets are developed or stolen by a hacker or threat actor designed to target your organization. These assets include things like a phishing website created to impersonate your brand.
ASD Offers Remediation Services
Even if your vulnerability assessment and attack surface reduction efforts are comprehensive, you can’t always prevent a cyber threat from harming your organization. Given that 79% of companies with data in the cloud have experienced a breach previously, having remediation strategies in place is vital for your organization.
Attack surface discovery is beneficial because it provides advanced remediation services if something goes wrong with your organization’s IT infrastructure. As your organization grows, your digital and physical attack surfaces expand, giving hackers new ways to access your system – and putting you at a greater risk.
Attack surface management services promote efficient and automated remediation to address each potential threat and promote fast response times using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.
ASD Provides Advanced Monitoring and Real-Time Risk Assessments
Attack surface management offers crucial monitoring and real-time risk assessments to ensure you always know everything about your organization’s IT infrastructure. Cyber threats are constantly present, and as hackers develop more sophisticated strategies for accessing your system, constant monitoring is always essential.
ASD services will continuously monitor your infrastructure and scan your system for vulnerabilities, ensuring you have information about attack vectors in real-time and providing security alerts so you’re always on top of your cyber security.
How JANUS Can Help
Having advanced and sophisticated attack surface discovery measures is crucial for safeguarding your organization and preventing common cyber threats that leave your system vulnerable. JANUS can help you navigate attack surface management by providing advanced cyber security services to ensure your IT infrastructure is constantly safe and secure.
Along with JANUS' ASD solution, a team of experts is available to assist you in comprehending and navigating your infrastructure with professional expertise. With JANUS, attack surface discovery and management is simple. Contact JANUS today or request a consultation to learn more about our services and how we can help your organization thrive.
