5 Strategies to Reduce Attack Surface Exposure

Bitsight was recently named an Overall Leader in the 2023 KuppingerCole Analyst AG Leadership Compass for Attack Surface Management. The report—which provides an overview and comparison of relevant vendors in defined segments—also identified Bitsight as a leader in several other categories, including Product Leader, Innovation Leader, and Market Leader.

To read the in-depth report analysis, download your free copy here.

There’s an enormous focus on companies protecting their digital infrastructure and attack surfaces, fueled by factors like digital transformation and the pandemic that accelerated new modes of working and expanding digital footprints. This has changed the game for security leaders; companies cannot afford to be reactive. Proactively discovering and securing your expanding attack surface to mitigate vulnerable areas across your organization and your supply chain has never been more critical and necessary.

Bitsight’s robust EASM capabilities, as a part of our comprehensive Security Performance Management (SPM) solution, empower security leaders to mitigate and reduce exposure proactively—and at scale. Our customers continuously discover new assets, analyze their exposure, respond to vulnerabilities, and remediate root cause issues across their own infrastructure and their third-party network.

Security leaders' concerns about introducing new blindspots can slow down business-driven expansion of digital footprints and vendor networks. Bitsight's holistic external attack surface management capabilities empower them to expand their ecosystem without worrying about expanded risk–across five key areas.

1. Discover & Classify Your Assets

We’ve invested in a combination of automation and human annotation to create the best entity maps in the industry, with nine patents attributing infrastructure to an organization. When you use Bitsight, your organization’s discovered assets are available from day one with a year of historical findings data.

You’ll have a visual display of your organization’s digital footprint. You can take the view we’ve developed and customize it to your own needs, grouping your organization (e.g. by subsidiary, business unit, geography) so everyone has the information they need and can act on it.

Gaining a list of all the assets that make up your externally exposed footprint is not enough. We provide an asset classification algorithm that helps classify data according to business relevance. We also allow grouping, tagging, and classifying assets according to products, services, and their hosting provider. And, we know that organizations are complex, so mapping capabilities are critical. You don’t have time to waste discovering how to route the assets' findings.

2. Analyze Your Exposure

Gaining complete visibility of your digital infrastructure is the first step—now, you need to understand the attacker’s point of view. And not just across your systems but your supply chain as well. Where are you exposed and potentially vulnerable to a cyber attack?

We have a wide range of exposure data starting with vulnerabilities, diligence, configurations across email, software, and web applications; and data on compromised systems, user behavior, public disclosures, and cyber threat intelligence. These come with a rich variety of contextual data about severity and timeline, and this data can be enriched with your own organizational context in order to support prioritizing exposure reduction.

Using this exposure data as the foundation, we overlay a framework that summarizes infrastructure insights through intuitive analytics (e.g. the Bitsight Rating Risk Vector Grades). This enables you to quickly gather the most relevant insights and easily understand where the prioritized exposure exists.

3. Tackle Remediation & Track Progress

Now that we’ve helped you prioritize what areas of exposure need to be addressed—we help you establish processes to manage those remediation efforts. Assign issues to your team and track efforts to understand progress and results in a scalable, centralized process.

Get to the root cause of exposure issues with insights into how your controls are performing so the same kinds of problems don't keep recurring and taking your team’s valuable time and attention. Connect detailed individual observations to relevant controls to assess how well the control is working and highlight opportunities for strategic risk reduction.

Additionally, this remediation work feeds into key governance metrics like the Bitsight Rating or Risk Vector Grades to help prioritize and communicate performance improvements.

4. Continuously Monitor Across the Extended Attack Surface

Keep an eye on your infrastructure and its exposure to know what’s changing—so you can stay on top of potential threats. Continuously monitor your infrastructure and supply chain to understand asset details and whether something is new or removed. Leveraging detailed attack surface information, you can directly engage with vendors about a wide range of exposures.

Streamline new information by adding attack surface and exposure data directly into your security workflow through Bitsight’s multiple integrations.

5. Respond Quickly to New Threats

When a new threat emerges, quickly understand your external exposure and exposure across your vendor ecosystem.

Save time gathering information and spend it mitigating risk. Get notified when we detect a significant change in your exposure metrics and prioritize your efforts using information like severity, asset importance, and location of the asset in your organization.

By means of an integration with Bitsight Vendor Risk Management, you can understand your third parties’ exposure status and engage with them at scale to prioritize and collaborate on remediation efforts.

Beyond Securing Your Attack Surface

Bitsight invented the security ratings industry in 2011, to enable you with key governance metrics like the Bitsight rating, Risk Vector Grades, and insights on how controls are performing. We have been enabling our customers to manage their external attack surface and reduce exposure since the beginning.

Once you understand the level of exposure within your organization and vendor ecosystem, Bitsight offers Governance and Assurance capabilities to layer onto our EASM solution that can help you put a program in place, and compare your level of risk with industry or competitive benchmarks. For example, customers today leverage our Risk Remediation & Forecasting tools to build out an actionable plan for the near and far term, and our reporting capabilities, like Peer Analytics, to empower security leaders like you to present all of this data in context that non-technical stakeholders will understand.

In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, CISOs and risk leaders have an opportunity to create meaningful change. To see what an attacker sees and prioritize remediation where they're vulnerable. To harness objective metrics to drive their strategy and improve performance. To efficiently understand financial exposure and take action. And to confidently report results with context. Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) empowers security leaders to get there.

Explore Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) capabilities here.