Automated Security Control Assessment (ASCA) solutions are one of several cybersecurity tools designed to enhance an organization’s security posture by identifying and addressing security and control gaps. Understanding the role of ASCA enables security teams to improve their security posture and the value provided by their existing security investments.
In this article
What Is ASCA?
Automated Security Control Assessment (ASCA) solutions identify control gaps within an organization’s security architecture, and recommend and prioritize solutions that can address these deficiencies. For example, an ASCA solution may audit the ruleset within an organization’s firewall and determine whether that ruleset provides adequate protection against anticipated threats or if additional rules and controls are needed to provide appropriate protection.
How ASCA Works
ASCA solutions continuously monitor an organization’s security architecture for potential blind spots and control gaps. They accomplish this by integrating with various security tools – such as endpoint detection and response (EDR), security information and event management (SIEM), and identity and access management (IAM) solutions – via APIs.
These connections provide the visibility required for the ASCA solutions to map out the existing control set used to protect the organization. These controls can then be compared against common cyber threats – such as the OWASP Top Ten or the MITRE ATT&CK framework – to determine if they offer adequate prevention and detection for these threats. Based on this, the tools simulate attacks to determine whether the organization’s existing controls offer adequate protection.
After mapping out these potential security and control gaps, the ASCA solution prioritizes them based on the associated risk and business impacts. Additionally, remediation guidance is provided alongside the prioritized results, enabling the organization to quickly move to address identified risks.
Benefits of ASCA
Deploying an ASCA platform can provide numerous benefits to the organization, including:
- Reduced Misconfigurations: ASCA is designed to identify misconfigurations and control gaps that place the organization at risk. Continuous monitoring and automated detection decrease the time required to identify misconfigurations and close these security gaps.
- Enhanced Efficiency: ASCA solutions automate the process of identifying control gaps, triaging them, and developing remediation strategies. This reduces manual effort and enhances operational efficiency.
- Faster Responses: With continuous monitoring, the security team can be notified immediately of a potential risk and is provided with the context necessary to make key decisions and remediate it. By speeding up time to resolution, ASCA reduces threat exposure and improves the organization’s overall security posture.
- Improved Visibility: ASCA integrates with various security solutions and provides centralized insight into the corporate security posture and control gaps. This visibility both enhances security and improves compliance.
- Reduced Human Error: ASCA solutions are designed to help automate security configuration and control management. This reduces the chance of mistakes and errors that could leave the organization vulnerable to attack.
- Simplified Compliance: ASCA checks existing controls against top threats and compliance requirements. This enables the organization to quickly address compliance gaps and reduces the chance of reportable security incidents.
- Greater Security ROI: ASCA identifies where deployed security solutions contain misconfigurations or control gaps that reduce their effectiveness. Eliminating these issues increases the benefit that existing technology provides to an organization’s security posture.
Limitations & Common Pitfalls
ASCA solutions can be a valuable addition to an organization’s security program if selected and implemented properly. However, they do have their limitations and common pitfalls, such as:
- False Positives: ASCA solutions attempt to identify relevant control gaps, but they need to be configured correctly to provide their full value. Otherwise, the solutions can be prone to false positives that waste time and resources.
- Integration Challenges: ASCA tools operate by integrating with an organization’s various security solutions via APIs and using these APIs to collect the data required to audit their configurations and controls. This can be problematic when dealing with security tools that don’t offer an API or don’t provide the necessary information using it.
- Management Complexity: ASCA solutions must be integrated with an organization’s security architecture and may need to be customized over time. This introduces another security tool for teams to manage.
ASCA vs. VM vs. CTEM
ASCA, VM, and CTEM are all cybersecurity solutions designed to reduce an organization’s threat exposure. However, they do so in different ways:
- ASCA: ASCA focuses on ensuring that an organization’s security controls are effective. It performs continuous scans leveraging API-based integrations and offers guidance on remediating identified gaps.
- VM: Vulnerability Management (VM) solutions identify unpatched vulnerabilities in an organization’s environment. They produce lists of these identified issues, often prioritized based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score.
- CTEM: Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a holistic approach to managing an organization’s risk and threat exposure. It provides continuous visibility and integrates many capabilities, including ASCA and VM, to provide prioritized recommendations about what risks and threats to mitigate.
Choosing an ASCA Platform
When evaluating potential ASCA platforms, some key considerations include the following:
- Control Coverage: An ASCA platform is intended to provide visibility into potential misconfigurations and control gaps across an organization’s entire IT environment. This means that tools should offer comprehensive control coverage across network, endpoint, cloud, and other controls.
- Real-Time Analysis and Reporting: Misconfigurations and control gaps can be introduced at any time due to software updates, configuration changes, and other events. ASCA solutions should provide continuous analysis and real-time reporting to ensure that security personnel have access to up-to-date information.
- Risk-Based Prioritization: Prioritization of identified issues should be based on the risks and potential impacts that they pose to the business. ASCA platforms should understand the organization’s business environment and include this information in their analyses.
- Integration Capabilities: ASCA solutions need to integrate with various security solutions to achieve the visibility necessary to perform this analysis. Out-of-the-box integrations are essential to minimize deployment challenges and time to value.
- Customizability and Flexibility: ASCA tools should be able to identify the control gaps that have the largest potential impact on an organization. This means that they should be configurable and flexible so that the organization can tune them to their needs.
- Scalability: ASCA solutions provide continuous analysis across an organization’s complex and growing network infrastructure. Scalability is essential to ensure that a solution can keep up and provide useful, real-time information.
- Regulatory Compliance: ASCA solutions offer the potential to identify security gaps and misconfigurations that threaten regulatory compliance. A solution should be familiar with applicable regulations and their requirements, and test controls against them.
ASCA + EASM: Better Together
ASCA and External Attack Surface Management (EASM) are complementary solutions that provide comprehensive visibility into an organization’s risk exposure. ASCA focuses on internal risks arising from misconfigurations and control gaps, while EASM identifies potential exposures in an organization’s external digital attack surface.
Combining ASCA and EASM provides comprehensive and streamlined threat visibility and management and lays the groundwork for a holistic CTEM program. Learn more about enhancing your organization’s threat management with the IONIX platform by signing up for a free demo.