Attack Surface Management, also known as “ASM,” is the first pillar in a larger Exposure Management approach.

According to Gartner, Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) is an emerging technology that enables security teams to solve persistent asset visibility and vulnerability challenges. CAASM solutions aggregate data from existing tools and data feeds to provide a continuous, multidimensional view of an organization’s entire attack surface.

According to Gartner, ASM responds to the following inquiries:

• From an attacker’s perspective, how does my organization look?
• What are the first issues attackers will see? How can cybersecurity find them and prioritize them?

A typical organisation is made up of a diverse variety of assets.

Physical: –

Desktop computers

Laptops

Mobile devices

USB ports

IoT devices

Improperly discarded hardware

But, if an organization isn’t even aware of all its assets, what happens?

What Isn’t Seen Can’t Be Protected?

According to research from industry analysis company ESG. 69% of firms have reported being the victim of an assault on an “unknown, unmanaged, or poorly managed internet-facing asset. This frequently involves ones that the company may have forgotten about or isn’t even aware exist (sometimes referred to as “shadow IT”). It seems sense that criminals have a lot of success abusing them.

It is difficult to find every asset managed by IT due to the explosion in both quantity and diversity. However, it is extremely important to highlight these unknown properties. What cannot be seen cannot be protected.

It is obvious that the quantity, variety, and complexity of IT asset management are growing, frequently to a point where cybersecurity teams are unable to properly track, manage, and secure them.

Attack Surface Management

It is understandable why Attack Surface Management has become a popular subject among cybersecurity experts.

However, cybersecurity and risk management vendors are referring to the same thing under a bewildering array of names, according to industry analyst firm Forrester Research. These consist of:

• Asset discovery
• Attack surface assessment
• Attack surface monitoring
• Digital asset discovery
• Digital footprint
• Digital risk monitoring
• Digital risk protection
• External attack surface management

Forrester advises businesses to consider their whole estate of IT assets as a whole.

And as per Gartner’s definition of ASM as a component of exposure management, the three parts of cyber asset attack surface management (for internal assets), external attack surface management, and digital risk protection services are the three key ASM capabilities.

Whatever the definition, industry experts concur that every company has to increase asset visibility, risk prioritization, and security management across the board.

Now, a Top Priority Is Attack Surface Management

We’ve determined that ASM may be summed up as the ongoing process of identifying, categorizing, and evaluating the security of all the assets inside an organization. The chance of a successful assault is reduced by accurate mapping of the attack surface and efficient defense of that surface. A thorough ASM program should have an accurate, current inventory of all IT assets, risk assessments, and a list of any security controls or other risk mitigation measures that have been implemented.

But what criteria should you consider while choosing an ASM solution?

We can start by stating that constant discovery, analysis, and protection are essential components of complete ASM.

Fortunately, these three essential ASM operations can be handled by automated methods. Analysts concur that an automated approach to ASM is essentially necessary for a program to be successful. A complete platform strategy that tightly combines vulnerability management, endpoint security, cloud security, web app security, and threat intelligence is even preferable for ASM.

BitSight’s Attack Surface Analytics solution enables you to gain visibility into your attack surface and the risks associated with cyber security threats and vulnerabilities within your digital ecosystem. With BitSight, you can monitor your attack surface to build cyber security and risk management programs that work better.

Conclusion

The post-COVID era is a difficult one right now. A unified approach to cybersecurity is necessary in light of cyberwarfare, an impending economic downturn, and the ongoing IT skills gap. It is obvious that ASM should be prioritized by both large and small businesses. Exposures and unmanaged assets will keep accumulating if the organization’s attack surface is not dynamically and comprehensively viewed in a dynamic IT environment.