How Exposure Management Fuels Preemptive Cybersecurity

Preemptive cybersecurity moves away from the reactive paradigm of traditional security solutions, focusing on identifying and preventing potential attacks rather than identifying and remediating them. Exposure management is a critical component of this process, offering the visibility required to determine exploitability of specific assets and then prioritize remediation based on the potential for exposure.

From Asset Discovery to Risk Removal

Preemptive security focuses on finding and fixing vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. Exposure management solutions offer end-to-end threat management for an organization, including everything from initial visibility to automated remediation.

Shadow IT Visibility

Shadow IT is a common source of cybersecurity risk. If employees set up cloud services, SaaS apps, or other software without approval, there is a high probability that these solutions will be unmonitored and insecurely configured. This creates opportunities for attackers to steal sensitive data or gain access to an organization’s environment.

Exposure management identifies shadow IT in an organization’s IT ecosystem, providing comprehensive security visibility. Ongoing monitoring is a vital component of this since the set of deployed applications and the vulnerabilities they contain can evolve over time.

Attack-Path Mapping

Cybercriminals rarely have an opportunity to directly access sensitive data or systems by exploiting a single vulnerability. More often, compromised credentials or a vulnerable public-facing system provide an initial foothold and greater access, allowing them to carry out the next stage of their attack.

Attack-path mapping explores how an attacker could take advantage of vulnerabilities to move from initial access to their eventual goal. This helps to determine the real risk that a particular threat poses to the business, enabling security teams to focus resources on significant threats rather than false positives.

Exploitability Validation

Traditional vulnerability scanners identify all vulnerabilities as potentially exploitable; however, this isn’t the case. Only a small percentage of vulnerabilities are exploitable, and an even smaller number have ever been exploited in the wild. The remainder pose no real threat to the business, making them poor candidates for remediation.

While exposure management tools can’t determine if an attacker will target an exploitable vulnerability, they can verify whether a vulnerability is exploitable at all. Attack simulation carries out a mock, non-destructive attack against a vulnerability to see if it could succeed. If a vulnerability can’t be exploited or security controls mitigate the threat, then the security team doesn’t need to waste time and resources addressing the non-existent threat.

Rapid Remediation Loops

Identifying and validating potential vulnerabilities provides no real security benefit to the business. Until the vulnerability has been remediated, it can be exploited by an attacker.

Exposure management solutions use automation to expedite the remediation of identified vulnerabilities. By orchestrating the remediation process and prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their potential real-world business impacts, these tools minimize the organization’s exposure to potential threats.

KPIs That Prove the Link

Key KPIs for preemptive security are identical to those for exposure management. Some of the most useful metrics to track include the following:

Exposure Discovery Rate

Exposure discovery rate measures how often an exposure management tool identifies new security risks. These could include shadow assets, misconfigurations, and other threats that put the organization at risk.
The exposure discovery rate is directly linked to the effectiveness of preemptive security because each identified vulnerability has the potential to prevent a future attack. The more identified – and validated – vulnerabilities discovered and corrected, the greater the reduction in the organization’s digital attack surface.

Validation Accuracy

The ability to identify vulnerabilities isn’t enough for preemptive security. Security teams are often inundated by false positives and low-risk vulnerabilities that consume time and resources. Vulnerability scanners and other tools that don’t validate vulnerabilities or properly prioritize them risk an organization missing the true threats to the business.

Validation accuracy is a key metric for measuring the effectiveness of an exposure management solution and a preemptive security program. Tools should use simulated attacks and threat intelligence to maximize the probability that an identified vulnerability is actually exploitable and poses a real risk to the business.

Remediation Velocity

Slow vulnerability remediation is a common problem as critical, actively exploited vulnerabilities are left unpatched for weeks or months. IT and security teams have numerous duties that limit the resources that they can devote to identifying and patching their vulnerable systems.

Ideally, exposure management solutions reduce mean time to remediation (MTTR) by automating and orchestrating the remediation process for identified vulnerabilities. As MTTR decreases, the window in which an attacker could exploit a vulnerability contracts as well.

Action Checklist for Security Teams

Preemptive security is the future of effective cybersecurity, and some key steps to implement an effective program include:

1. Perform Continuous Discovery: New vulnerabilities and shadow assets can be introduced at any time. Continuous monitoring is essential to maintain up-to-date visibility into potential threats.
2. Map Attack Paths: Attack paths map out how an attacker can use a chain of vulnerabilities or security gaps to move from initial access to final objectives. Mapping attack paths is invaluable for threat verification and vulnerability prioritization.
3. Validate and Prioritize Vulnerabilities: False positives and low-risk vulnerabilities waste valuable time and resources. CVSS and even EPSS scores help with potential vulnerabilities, but can’t help determine if an asset has a mitigating control in place, leaving too many things marked as “critical”. Attack simulation and vulnerability prioritization based on context, exploitability and  business impacts maximizes the return on investment of remediation actions.
4. Automate Remediation: Manual remediation processes are unscalable and expand the window that an attacker has to exploit a vulnerability. Strategic automation of remediation actions closes vulnerabilities more quickly while freeing up security teams for other tasks.
5. Track KPIs: KPIs demonstrate the value that exposure management provides to the business. The number of identified and remediated vulnerabilities and the reduction in MTTR provide clear business benefits.

Implementing Preemptive Security with Exposure Management

Exposure management is foundational for preemptive security, offering the visibility needed to understand and prioritize  threats along with the automation required to close identified security gaps before they can be exploited by an attacker. 

The IONIX platform offers continuous visibility into misconfigurations and shadow IT in an organization’s environment, enabling security teams to focus their efforts on real threats to the business. To learn more about getting in front of potential attacks with IONIX, sign up for a demo.