What is Attack Surface Management?

A new emerging concept and disciplines within the cyber security called Attack Surface Management (ASM) has become a crucial component of comprehensive cybersecurity strategies. Understanding and managing the attack surface is essential for protecting an organization’s information assets. ASM is an approach to protecting organization digital assets by changing the perspective of security to an attacker (hacker) perspective. Attack Surface is an approach to map everything relatable to organization, it provides an perspective of how to protect assets and doing so is much like how an attacker would do. This article explores what ASM entails, its importance, and best practices for effective implementation.

Understanding Attack Surface Management

Attack Surface Management refers to the continuous discovery, analysis, monitoring and map of an organization’s digital assets to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit, doing so from an attacker point of view. The attack surface includes all the points where an unauthorized user (the attacker) can try to enter data to or extract data from an environment. This encompasses:

• Networks
• Applications
• Endpoints
• Cloud services
• Third-party integrations

and much more other categories of cyber security, categories that always evolve and will be knowledgeable by an expert of cyber security.

Key Components of ASM

1. Asset Discovery: Identify all digital assets, including those that might be unknown or shadow IT. This process is continuous and essential for maintaining an up-to-date inventory of all potential entry points. The reason this one is continuous is because assets are always evolving within company and over time there are new ones that are important to be map in ASM.
2. Vulnerability Management: Regularly scan and assess assets for vulnerabilities. This includes patch management, configuration reviews, and security assessments to ensure that all known vulnerabilities are addressed promptly.
3. Threat Intelligence: Incorporate threat intelligence to stay informed about emerging threats and attack techniques. This helps in prioritizing the remediation of vulnerabilities based on the current threat landscape.
4. Attack Surface Analysis: Analyze the attack surface to understand the potential impact of different vulnerabilities. This involves understanding the pathways that an attacker could use to exploit vulnerabilities and reach critical assets.

Why is Attack Surface Management Important?

In today’s digital environment, organizations face numerous challenges in protecting their information systems. The attack surface is constantly expanding due to the adoption of new technologies, increasing use of third-party services, and the rise of remote work. Effective Attack Surface Management provides several benefits:

• Risk Reduction: By identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities proactively, organizations can reduce the risk of successful cyber-attacks.
• Improved Compliance: Many regulatory frameworks require regular security assessments and vulnerability management. ASM helps organizations meet these requirements and avoid penalties.
• Enhanced Visibility: ASM provides a comprehensive view of the organization’s security posture, enabling better decision-making and resource allocation.

In addition, ASM provide a perspective from an attacker point of view and ASM try’s to provide a wholesome full scale view of what happens within our organization with (hopefully) simplify language and easier to understand for C level manaegmenet, CTO and higher level relevant stack holders.

Best Practices for Effective ASM

Implementing a robust ASM program involves several best practices:

1. Continuous Monitoring: Use automated tools to continuously monitor the attack surface for changes and new vulnerabilities.
2. Integration with Security Operations: Integrate ASM with other security operations, such as incident response and security information and event management (SIEM), for a holistic approach to security.
3. Collaboration Across Teams: Ensure that different teams, including IT, security, and development, collaborate effectively to manage the attack surface.
4. Regular Training: Provide regular training for employees on security best practices and the importance of ASM. This helps in building a security-aware culture within the organization.

Goal of ASM

There are few goals that ASM assist our organization when we implement ASM to improve security posture of an organization.

1. continue process of security and safety.
   • having active process and active dashboard where we see monitoring and changing within security issues within our organization is a great way to keep information security management a top priority for our team members.
2. reduce exposure of security vulnerabilities.
   • exposure and highlight issues and management and analysis or risks and security vulnerabilities, reduce the exposure to those security vulnerabilities and issues.
3. discover of digital assets, risks and technologies within organization products
   • In many case we might not be aware of our organization digital assets, organization can have a long history and rapid growth which hide certain digital assets. this discovery journey assist not only for our information security teams but also for us as a C level management that want to peak into our organization risks, technologies and old and new digital assets.

EASM

EASM (External Attack Surface Management) refers to the practice of identifying, monitoring, and managing the digital assets and vulnerabilities that are exposed to the internet and accessible from outside an organization’s internal network. EASM focuses on understanding and mitigating risks associated with public-facing assets such as websites, APIs, cloud services, and third-party integrations to prevent external cyber threats. EASM is even newer approach to ASM that takes furthuer the risks of publicity access digital assets. in some cases some organizations are not even aware that their assets are publicly accessible! hence why this is such an important category of information security within the disciplines of ASM.

Let’s take a look at below table that explains the differences between EASM to ASM so we could better understand things like scope, assets management, primary goal and more regards EASM and ASM.

Aspect	ASM (Attack Surface Management)	EASM (External Attack Surface Management)
Scope	Comprehensive, covering both internal and external assets	Focused on external, internet-facing assets
Assets Managed	Networks, applications, endpoints, cloud services, internal systems	Public-facing websites, APIs, cloud services, third-party integrations
Primary Goal	Manage and reduce the attack surface overall	Identify and mitigate risks from external threats
Monitoring	Includes internal and external monitoring	Primarily external monitoring
Typical Use Cases	Broad security posture management	Defense against external cyber threats
Examples of Assets Analyzed	Internal databases, internal applications, intranet sites	Public websites, external APIs, public cloud services
Implementation Complexity	Higher, due to wider scope	Lower, focused on specific external assets
Source of Risk	Attacker can be both from inside and outside of organization	Attacker is likely to be from outside and perspective is taken into consideration.
Integration with Security Operations	Integral part of overall security operations	Specialized focus, often integrated with ASM

Automation ASM

automation for ASM is super important as we want our digital assets to be continuously challenged and tested for newly created information security risks.

Automation example 1: let’s say our digital assets need to be limited access, in this case we’ll try access the digital asset (for example a domain) from the public domain, and since our digital asset is limited in accessibility we shouldn’t be able and access the digital assets from the public. This test, should be done from time to time because configuration, systems, technology and mis-communication between teams and human mistakes can occur! however, we don’t want to perform that test every time manually, this is why we can automated that process for example with AWS routes 53 and URL scan.

Automation example 2: let’s assume that emails can be submitted only to a pre-define white-list of domains, because we don’t want organization members to submit sensitive information from organization emails to external resources. and again, this one as well can be fully automated and tested once in a while.

Automation example 3: assuming API have certain limitation for security, we’d want to perform timely manner tests on that API to map whether those limitation still exists or not.

Automation has a huge benefits to reduce certain risks and making sure we run information security tests from time to time on our system.

ASM Dashboard

Let’s take a look at tools examples like a dashboard that illustrate attack surface management. Below dashboard we can see most severe issues, total security issues, new technologies, most recent issues – because as we said before, ASM is an disciplines where security vulnerabilities are sometime that continue to exists and grow, hence why having a dashboard with detailed reports can assist organization security stack-holders to manage and assets upcoming issues and response accordingly.

ASM Videos

let’s take a look at below videos that will help us understand ASM further. below video answer the question “when should organization perform Attack Surface Management”:

Conclusion

In conclusion, Attack Surface Management is an essential practice for any organization looking to secure its digital assets against the growing number of cyber threats. By continuously discovering, analyzing, and monitoring the attack surface, organizations can proactively mitigate vulnerabilities and enhance their overall security posture.