4 Steps Toward Knowing Your Exploitable Attack Surface

Take the Adversarial Perspective
The only way to filter through the sea of vulnerabilities is by attempting to exploit them. That's what an adversary would do. This way, security teams get a concise attack vector pointing to the organization's weakest link. From here, the remediation requests handed to IT are focused, manageable, and based on business impact. And the rest of the vulnerabilities can wait for ongoing patch management tasks. Taking the attacker’s point of view will allow the organization to lead a proactive security program rather than reacting to incidents as they (inevitably) crop up.

Cover the Full Scope of Potential Attacks
Adversaries take the path of least resistance to the critical assets. This means using the variety of techniques at their disposal to progress an attack, leveraging any vulnerability and its relevant correlations along the way. Accordingly, the validation methods used must match — they need to go beyond the static vulnerability scan or control attack simulation to include a full penetration test scope. This would cover attack emulation frameworks for security controls, vulnerability and credential strength attacks, network equipment testing, privileged access audits, lateral movement steps, and more.

Automate, Automate, Automate
Security validation today must be as dynamic as the attack surface it's securing. Periodical and manual tests are no longer sufficient to challenge the changes an organization undergoes. Security teams need to have an on-demand view of their assets and exposures, and the only way to get there is by automating testing. The growth in digitalization and cloud adoption, remote work, ransomware threats, and recently Log4Shell are just a few examples of how important continuous validation is for security teams to properly defend their organization.

Align to MITRE ATT&CK and OWASP Top 10
By aligning to industry standards, security teams ensure that their testing covers the latest adversary techniques. As most attacks succeed by leveraging the most common TTPs, challenging the attack surface against these frameworks provides comprehensive coverage of adversary techniques in the wild. In addition, it allows security executives to clearly report to management on validation of security control efficacy and enterprise readiness against potential threats.

Agentless, low touch implementation to ensure minimum to no overhead. 

Automated, zero playbook, testing, which provides a consistent process for security gap discovery and remediation. 

Safely attack the production network, leveraging ethical exploits to emulate the adversary without disrupting business operations. 

Validate the entire security stack with full scope of real-world techniques aligned to industry frameworks. 

Expose security gaps in cloud workloads and emulate lateral expansion weaknesses from on-premises to the cloud to the remote workforce. 

Immediate reporting that provides a prioritized list of which vulnerabilities are critical to fix based on business impact.