What is threat exposure?
Threat exposure is the sum of risk created by the vulnerabilities and threats within an organization’s IT environment, including networks, systems, applications, and data. By continuously monitoring IT environments and evaluating threat exposure, organizations can quantify the risk within their systems, measure the strength of their security programs, and prioritize assets to remediate the greatest risks.
The challenge of managing threat exposure
Cyber threats continue to proliferate at a rapid pace, causing organizations large and small to constantly refine their security programs. For CISOs charged with mitigating threats and reducing risk, managing threat exposure is a constant challenge, as attackers are continually developing new tactics and techniques to circumvent existing security controls. Though CISOs have plenty of technology for monitoring threat exposure and identifying attacks, these tools often operate in silos, preventing security teams from accessing a comprehensive view of risk. Many security solutions overwhelm teams with too many alerts, making it difficult to separate critical intelligence from the noise. Lacking critical insight, CISOs and their teams are often stuck in a cycle of reacting to threats rather than preventing them.
As a leader in managing and monitoring cyber risk, Bitsight offers solutions and powerful tools for minimizing threat exposure. Bitsight’s exposure management solutions enable you and your security teams to effectively visualize your IT environment, monitor systems for vulnerabilities, improve attack surface management, and mitigate risk from third parties. With Bitsight’s threat exposure technology, you can continuously measure threat exposure and the effectiveness of your security programs, with insights that simplify communication with stakeholders—and guide security decision-making.
Best practices for preventing threats and cyber risk exposure
As you work to understand and mitigate threat exposure, these five best practices can help to focus your efforts for maximum value and effectiveness.
Understand your expanding attack surface
Understanding and mitigating risk becomes more difficult as your digital footprint grows. Yet complete visibility is essential for cyber exposure management, since you can’t secure what you can’t see. To visualize your attack surface, you’ll need tools that provide insight into all your digital assets across cloud environments, geographies, subsidiaries, business units, and the connections in remote locations and home offices. Along with this inventory of digital assets, your visualization tools should provide details about the security posture of each asset—so you can quickly identify and prioritize the areas of highest risk.
Spot emerging and hidden vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities in software and infrastructure are a constant source of threat exposure. To mitigate these risks, you need tools for automatically scanning for vulnerabilities and automatically monitoring networks, systems, and applications. By uncovering vulnerabilities such as open ports, misconfigurations, and outdated software, you can proactively identify and address hidden vulnerabilities and allocate resources to mitigate risk.
Find the root cause of security flaws
Too often, your security teams are repeatedly remediating the same threats without identifying the root cause of these threat exposures. To improve security performance, you must identify the underlying factors or behavior that contributed to a security flaw and implement effective preventive measures to avoid similar events in the future. Identifying root causes also helps to prioritize remediation efforts and establish accountability to improve incident response procedures.
Discover third-party cyber risks
The rise of supply chain attacks illuminates the risks that exist in third-party ecosystems and the need for effective third-party risk management tools. To mitigate threat exposure from vendors, you can conduct thorough security assessments, monitor third-party security practices, and establish incident response protocols in collaboration with vendors.
Detect and respond to zero-day vulnerabilities
Zero-day vulnerabilities are software flaws that attackers exploit before the developer has released a patch to mitigate them. To mitigate zero-day attacks within your third-party network, you need rapid detection tools that continuously monitor the security posture of vendors and facilitate vendor outreach, track vendor responses, and identify areas where additional action is needed to protect your organization.
Threat exposure management with Bitsight
Enterprises, governments, and organizations across all industries rely on Bitsight to accelerate digital transformation and expand distributed ecosystems—without expanding their attack surfaces or financial woes. Having pioneered the security ratings industry more than a decade ago, Bitsight today provides actionable financial and business insights that help CISOs manage cyber risk effectively by speaking the language of their business leaders and boards.
Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM)—one of Bitsight’s core offerings—offers advanced tools for strengthening security posture with effective threat exposure management. Bitsight SPM solves key challenges in cyber risk governance and threat exposure, delivering strategic insights that let you set and hit the right targets. With Bitsight, you can fix immediate threat exposure concerns and watch for new ones while you confidently tell your security performance story in ways that make sense to your stakeholders. Solutions within Bitsight SPM include:
- Continuous monitoring. Bitsight’s powerful data and analytics platform continuously monitors your IT environment for unknown vulnerabilities and automatically identifies gaps in your security controls. A central dashboard gives you a holistic external view of your digital footprint, letting you quickly assess the corresponding risk for each digital asset, cloud service, and shadow IT application. With these insights, you can make more informed decisions about where to focus efforts to stay one step ahead of threat actors.
- Attack surface management. Bitsight External Attack Surface Management (EASM) enables you to visualize and understand your expanding attack surface, seeing exactly what attackers see as you keep track of cloud infrastructure and countless digital assets. By delivering comprehensive visibility, Bitsight fixes immediate exposure issues and gets to the root cause of issues so you don’t see repeat problems.
- Cyber risk quantification. Bitsight lets you translate cyber risk and threat exposure into a universal language that everyone in your organization can understand. By quantifying the financial impact of cyber risk, you can build context to help business leaders make better decisions and prioritize investments.
Managing third-party threat exposure
In today’s cybersecurity landscape, more than 60% of system intrusion incidents originate within an organization’s third-party ecosystem1. To mitigate threat exposure in your supply chain, your teams need vendor risk monitoring tools to understand the cyber risk that each vendor represents—from onboarding throughout the life of the contract.
Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) delivers a near real-time snapshot of security performance in your third-party portfolio. Bitsight alerts in near real-time the moment a new risk is detected, allowing your teams to determine whether a more in-depth vendor risk assessment is needed. Bitsight even continuously monitors fourth parties to provide a comprehensive view of your extended attack surface. When a major security event or zero-day vulnerability occurs, Bitsight assesses the impact across your supply chain and simplifies collaboration with vendors to remediate risk and track responses—all from within a centralized dashboard.
Why choose Bitsight?
CISOs, risk leaders, business leaders, and boards choose Bitsight’s integrated cyber risk management solutions to manage risk and global regulatory demands while building trust across their ecosystems. Bitsight solutions stabilize cyber risk uncertainty and give CISOs more control, ownership, and confidence. With Bitsight, CISOs and their organizations can expand distributed ecosystems without expanding attack surfaces, accelerate transformation without increasing financial turbulence, and add vendors without adding their vulnerabilities.
Over 3,000+ global enterprises trust Bitsight’s data, tools, and integrated applications to improve essential workflows across exposure, performance, and risk. Ultimately, Bitsight empowers stakeholders and teams at every level to speak a common language concerning risk and threat exposure, building the kind of trust that frees organizations to grow with confidence.