The prevalence of cyber attacks has become a harsh reality. A study shows that 69% of organizations have fallen victim to a cyber attack originating from the exploitation of an unknown or unmanaged Internet-facing asset. This fact highlights a critical security challenge—the lack of complete visibility into an organization’s IT environment.
Several factors contribute to limited asset visibility. Shadow IT, where employees use unauthorized technologies, is a primary example. It creates blind spots for security teams and the issue has worsened in recent years, following the increased adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
An approach to address or at least mitigate shadow IT risks is to create a detailed map of all external assets through comprehensive asset discovery and attribution.
What Is Asset Attribution in External Attack Surface Management?
Asset attribution is the process of explicitly linking a discovered external asset to your organization’s infrastructure by making a detailed map of its place within the overall asset ecosystem in relation to other assets.
Asset attribution is a critical part of attack surface discovery, the process of identifying an organization’s Internet-facing assets and the vulnerabilities attached to them. It comes after and goes beyond simply identifying and classifying an Internet-facing asset.
The process involves in-depth analysis to reveal not just the asset but also its dependencies and connections with other external assets. This exercise helps contextualize previously unknown assets lurking within your environment.
What Happens When Assets Remain Unattributed?
Unattributed assets can create significant security risks for organizations. Lack of attribution can specifically lead to:
- Increased risk of attack: Because they are not specifically recognized as part of an organization’s digital environment, unattributed assets may not be included or prioritized in scans and security patching efforts, potentially creating a major problem since many cyber attacks stem from unpatched vulnerabilities. An example would be the Equifax data breach, where threat actors exploited an unpatched Apache Struts vulnerability to access the sensitive information of millions of affected organizations’ customers. The attack cost Equifax more than £11 million in fines.
- Delayed threat detection and incident response: When a security incident occurs, identifying compromised assets is crucial for swift containment and damage control. But that is much harder to do if security teams don’t know what assets are involved and interconnected. They may struggle to investigate and isolate affected assets, leading to delays in response and allowing attackers more time to exploit the breach and potentially escalate the damage.
- Compliance issues: Many regulations and industry standards require organizations to maintain a comprehensive inventory of their IT assets. For example, those who want to attain ISO 27001 certification need to have risk assessment and management programs in place. A significant part of that is creating and maintaining an accurate and complete asset inventory, which can be made richer through asset attribution.
- Expanded attack surface: An unattributed asset may engender contextual gaps. Security teams may not know what the asset is, what it does, or how it’s connected to the rest of the ecosystem. The existence of unattributed assets generally creates a larger attack surface for malicious actors to exploit, leaving organizations more vulnerable.
What You Can Do
Managing security exposure is a major pressure point for cybersecurity leaders, according to the Gartner Top Trends in Cybersecurity 2024 survey. Attack surface expansion contributes to this pressure even more since the larger an organization’s attack surface is, the more exposed it is to threats.
Taking control of your external attack surface can be a challenge, but asset attribution can help in several ways.
Enriched Asset Discovery
Asset attribution provides deep context to all discovered external assets. While attack surface discovery begins by identifying external assets like subdomains or email addresses, asset attribution goes a step further by providing adjacent data points and links, such as connected technologies, DNS records, and ownership information. This context empowers security teams to understand how assets can get exploited.
Uncover Asset-to-Asset Dependencies
Asset attribution helps security teams pinpoint an asset’s dependencies, revealing how it connects to other parts of the IT environment. By understanding connections, security teams can identify attack paths in the form of other resources that may get compromised if the initial asset gets exploited.
Automate Security Operations Tasks Based on Asset Attributes
Knowing exactly which assets belong to your organization and how they relate to each other has the power to simplify security operations tasks, such as vulnerability prioritization, patching, and incident response. Security teams can automate these tasks based on an asset’s criticality and how other sensitive assets can be impacted.
Enhanced Continuous Monitoring
Monitoring attack surfaces is crucial as organizations continue to evolve. Asset attribution plays a role in this process since with each new asset and its discovery path and dependency map comes additional data points that security teams can leverage to identify new attack vectors and proactively address potential weaknesses. Over time, this process can have a compounding effect that leads to more robust attack surface discovery.
Conclusion
Organizations can’t afford to operate with security blind spots in their IT environment, making comprehensive and contextualized attack surface discovery critical. Asset attribution strengthens this process, enabling organizations to map asset-to-asset connections and analyze the relationships between assets and technologies.
Curious to uncover the connections between your external assets? Kick off your 30-day free trial with Attaxion today.