Defending against external threats has become more critical than ever given that outsiders are said to be responsible for 83% of cyber attacks. Organizations have to beef up their external attack surface management (EASM) efforts. It is, after all, one good way to proactively defend against external threats.
This trend is reflected in today’s EASM market that experts expect to further grow in revenue from US$545.2 million in 2022 to US$930.7 million in 2026. And since EASM has been identified as a top cybersecurity trend in the next 5–10 years, pushing more vendors to enter the market, how can organizations maximize their EASM investment? What should they expect from their chosen EASM platform?
What Are the 3 Biggest EASM Issues in 2024?
Confusion can stem from having an overwhelming pool of choices in cybersecurity. How do organizations ensure they are making a value-driven decision regarding EASM?
Approaching the matter from a problem-solving perspective may be able to shed some light. So, let us dive into three big EASM issues experts believe organizations are bound to face this year.
Are You Keeping a Close Eye on Shadow IT?
On average, organizations that have started using EASM tools found 35% more assets than they previously knew they had. And that is not surprising given how easy it is for employees to sign up for anything-as-a-service (XaaS) accounts, contributing to shadow IT or the sum of resources outside IT oversight and protection that can expose systems and applications to cyber risks.
Add to that the fact that only 1% of organizations are fully aware of their Internet-facing assets, and you will have an even bigger problem. It is quite clear, therefore, that lack of complete infrastructure visibility is a crucial issue.
Is Your IT Ecosystem Too Disparate to Handle?
Cybersecurity experts have been touting as far back as the 2010s that perimeter security is no longer enough. And that is true given the move to the cloud, increased reliance on data centers, and unprecedented growth in digital transformation.
Organizations’ IT ecosystems now include hundreds if not thousands of endpoints and assets scattered across multiple locations and devices. Apart from their core network, they can have several regional offices, subsidiaries, third-party hosting providers, and business partners located beyond the extent of their firewall.
Is Security Automation More of a Boon Than a Bane?
While some may be averse to automating cybersecurity for fear of undervaluing their analysts, investing too much financially, or becoming complacent, more believe automation is the way to go.
Scaling up is, after all, inevitable for both the threat landscape and an organization. In that sense, companies may have to resort to automation, even for cybersecurity given that manual EASM costs time.
No matter how big an organization’s cybersecurity team is, they may find it impossible to keep pace with the ever-increasing number of exploitable vulnerabilities. It does not help that as many as 55 software vulnerabilities alone are reported daily. It also takes between 208 (low severity) and 88 (critical severity) days for a team to patch a single vulnerability.
What Can You Do?
Complete visibility, one that extends to shadow IT and beyond the network perimeter, is critical if organizations are to truly minimize risks and thwart cyber attacks. They not only need to know their external attack surface but also its intricacies—the risks each asset poses, how critical it is to their operation, and how bad it would be if they get attacked. On top of that, they must keep up with the pace at which attacks get launched.
Today, that means tackling the biggest EASM issues we named earlier. Here are some concrete steps you can take.
Shadow IT
Addressing the looming shadow IT issue requires conducting regular employee security training while expanding the scope of asset discovery. Mitigating shadow IT risks also means monitoring domains, subdomains, and IP addresses that could be associated with unauthorized or inadequately secured online accounts and connected services. Instead of relying on traditional methods, try automation to uncover all your Internet-facing assets. Conduct comprehensive scans to identify new assets and potential vulnerabilities regularly.
Come up with a strategy that facilitates the continuous discovery of unknown assets using an EASM platform that automatically identifies all your external-facing touch points to uncover unknown assets and provides essential context about them, including associated vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats. EASM can reduce your organization’s attack surface despite the sometimes unavoidable growth in shadow IT.
Disparate IT ecosystem
EASM should include keeping a close eye on and protecting even those outside your network perimeter. Assets in connected third-party IT environments are bound to have vulnerabilities that can affect an organization’s network. They should all thus be included in EASM efforts.
Organizations must get rid of overly permissive access controls, close unnecessary ports, patch outdated software, and secure API gateways that can lead to data exposure.
EASM platforms can provide centralized control of and complete visibility even for assets outside an organization’s network perimeter—a necessary capability given that 29% of data breaches stem from attacks on connected third parties.
Security automation woes
Given the rapid pace at which threat actors launch attacks and networks expand, even the best-manned security teams may not be able to keep up. They will need to monitor a dynamic attack surface, requiring extensive time and resources even if at times they will not be able to achieve actionable visibility. They will have to sift through massive amounts of data and too many alerts, which can be draining.
Organizations need EASM tools that have built-in prioritization and alert triage capabilities that offer actionable insights to stay abreast, maybe even ahead, of the attack curve.
—
We cannot stop attack surfaces from expanding both due to internal and external factors. But staying abreast of what is happening in the overall threat landscape and keeping up with digitalization through security automation can help your security team and management deal with the threats and risks of the future.
Find out how Attaxion can bring your EASM efforts up to speed with the biggest challenges in 2024. Schedule a customized demo now.