The Limitations of ASCA (and How to Overcome Them)

Automated Security Control Assessment (ASCA) is a security technology designed to address the potential risks of inadequate security controls and configuration drift. These platforms integrate with an organization’s existing security architecture and use a combination of policy reviews and simulated attacks to identify potential security gaps. These findings are then prioritized based on business impacts and reported to security personnel.

ASCA’s ability to provide continuous, detailed visibility into an organization’s security architecture can reduce cybersecurity risk and simplify regulatory compliance. However, ASCA solutions have limitations that require careful design, deployment, and maintenance.

False Positives & Noise

ASCA platforms identify control gaps and misconfigurations via policy reviews and simulated attacks. This creates the possibility that some of the issues identified by these tools may be false positives. For example, if an ASCA solution is unaware of a particular security solution, then the controls that it provides may be identified as security gaps by the platform.

False positives negatively impact a security team and their remediation efforts. The effort spent identifying and weeding out these incorrect detections takes time and resources away from addressing true threats. As a result, trusting ASCA output without proper validation places the organization at risk.

Coverage Blind Spots

Ideally, an ASCA solution has comprehensive visibility into every aspect of an organization’s security infrastructure. This is essential to accurately determine the effectiveness of the organization’s security controls in protecting against top threats and maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements.

However, ASCA solutions may have imperfect visibility in cloud environments, where security responsibility is shared with the cloud provider. Additionally, Software as a Service (SaaS) applications can introduce new potential security risks and configuration errors, especially if the organization has a complex cloud environment.

Integration & Workflow Friction

ASCA platforms achieve the visibility necessary to identify misconfigurations and control gaps by integrating with other security solutions, such as security information and event management (SIEM) solutions and security orchestration and response (SOAR) tools. This is commonly achieved by connecting these solutions via application programming interfaces (APIs), which allow ASCA solutions to collect important security data and automatically initiate the simulated attacks needed to assess the effectiveness of the organization’s security posture.

However, the need to integrate ASCA with the various elements of an organization’s security architecture can introduce additional friction within security workflows. While the ASCA platform may offer API-based integrations with certain security solutions out-of-the-box, this may not be true for all of an organization’s security stack, particularly if it includes legacy or niche solutions.

The need to manually integrate solutions introduces additional work for security teams and can lead to imperfect visibility if solutions aren’t integrated or the integration lacks key features. Additionally, a lack of integration can cause additional workflow friction if employees need to context switch between various dashboards and tools to maintain the level of visibility and control required for security and regulatory compliance.

Four Mitigation Strategies

ASCA solutions have significant potential, but this can be undermined by their various limitations and associated challenges. Some best practices and mitigation strategies to help overcome these issues include the following:

#1. Implement Business-Centric Prioritization

One common shortcoming of ASCA solutions and other vulnerability management tools is a failure to properly prioritize alerts. Often, these tools use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) for this, which classifies vulnerabilities based on their severity without considering the unique needs of the business.

ASCA solutions have the context and data required to determine whether a particular misconfiguration or control gap impacts critical assets or workflows. Working this information into risk prioritization helps to protect against false positives and noise by ensuring that the top-ranked findings have significant potential impacts and are likely to pose real threats to the business.

Look for Comprehensive Coverage

The goal of ASCA is to provide holistic visibility into control gaps and misconfigurations within an organization’s security infrastructure. To accomplish this, these platforms require visibility into every aspect of an organization’s IT environment, including networks, endpoints, mobile devices, and the cloud.

Different environments and ecosystems have their own unique security needs, and an ASCA solution needs to reflect this. The organization should deploy solutions with deep visibility into these environments and integrate these solutions with their ASCA platform to ensure seamless security visibility across environments.

Consider Integration Complexity

Integration is key to the effectiveness of an ASCA platform. Without the ability to query security tools or initiate scans, a tool lacks the ability to accurately assess the effectiveness of an organization’s security controls via policy review and simulated attacks.

For this reason, integration complexity is a key factor to consider when selecting an ASCA platform. Ideally, ASCA solutions will automatically detect solutions within an organization’s environment and have out-of-the-box integrations for many common security tools, reducing the challenge of achieving the visibility that the platform needs.

Make Use of Automation

ASCA platforms are designed to provide comprehensive, up-to-date visibility into an organization’s current security posture. They achieve this via heavy use of automation, performing scans, prioritizing findings, and offering remediation advice on a continuous basis.

To maximize the value of an ASCA solution investment, take full advantage of the automation options offered by the platform. Integrating the tool with other security solutions and automating scans, prioritization, and other tasks reduces the load on security teams and maximizes the value of the information provided.

Enhancing Security Visibility with IONIX

ASCA platforms are valuable tools, but they’re only one component of a holistic Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) program. The objective of CTEM is to achieve up-to-date, comprehensive visibility into an organization’s internal and external digital attack surfaces. With an attacker-centric and risk-focused approach to vulnerability management, an organization can allocate security resources to maximize the impact of remediation activities on its risk exposure.

The IONIX CTEM platform provides continuous, holistic security visibility via simulated attacks and comprehensive monitoring of an organization’s true digital attack surface. To learn more about how IONIX can help your organization’s security program, sign up for a free demo.