Cyber asset attack surface management is seeing massive adoption due to increasing complexity in an organization’s digital infrastructure. The proliferation of cloud, SaaS, and mobile applications combined with distributed work practices mean that organizations must catalog and monitor assets outside their control. CAASM enables teams to maintain full visibility into all external and internet-facing IT assets through a single pane of glass. This includes a company’s on-site assets, cloud-based IT, and subsidiaries’ networks.
Banking & Finance
Due to rapid digital transformation & cloud migration, financial institutions have an ever-expanding attack surface. A lack of visibility & control over all Internet-facing assets exposes these organizations to cyberattacks. CAASM provides a centralized & accurate outside-in view of all your company’s Internet-connected assets, enabling you to detect vulnerabilities that attackers can leverage. The security of sensitive information like credit card numbers & bank accounts is paramount for the banking & finance sector. Threat actors are continuously searching for new opportunities in the form of open-source code, IoT devices & hidden malware injected into customer-facing apps. With CAASM, these unknown assets are discoverable & classified by your team, allowing you to prioritize remediation. This is especially important for cutting down on advanced persistent threats (APTs) & other cyber attacks that are hard to detect.
Healthcare
Cyber threat actors target the most vulnerable assets in your attack surface — from your network infrastructure to your cloud services. These internet-connected hardware, software, and IoT devices can create hidden entry points for attackers to gain unauthorized access. CAASM is essential for any business to understand & reduce these risks.
CAASM is a cybersecurity solution that combines internal & external data to help businesses maintain visibility into their attack surfaces from an outside-in perspective. It uses API integrations to merge structural data — including vulnerability scanning results, CMDB entries, IAM policies, and more — into a single view of their cyber assets and exposures.
This allows security teams to identify, prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities with ease. For example, a governmental organization may discover that one of its third-party vendors possesses a remote access vulnerability that could allow hackers to steal citizen data.
Retail
A comprehensive attack surface management solution consists of four core processes: asset discovery, classification, prioritization, remediation, and monitoring. It allows security teams to discover & centralize all their assets (routers, servers, company-issued and remote employee devices, IoT devices, user directories, and SaaS applications deployed on-premises or in the cloud) and spot vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.
With actionable risk scoring and security ratings, it’s nearly possible to identify vulnerabilities or potential entry points for cyber attackers that could result in data breaches or other cyber attacks. This is why it’s important for organizations to continuously scan & assess their digital assets to understand their current security posture and reduce the number of opportunities hackers can exploit. With today’s dynamic environments & supply chain ecosystems, it is crucial to have centralized visibility of all internet-facing assets to prevent blind spots & security gaps from being exploited by hackers.
Insurance
Attack surfaces are expanding rapidly & increasingly complex. Whether from cyber-physical systems, IoT, cloud applications, complex digital supply chains, or social media, threat actors can now discover & exploit assets outside of the traditional enterprise network. The resulting blind spots leave organizations more vulnerable to sophisticated cyberattacks.
Companies need a complete and accurate inventory of all their assets across the entire attack surface, including on-premises, remote & cloud-based infrastructure, company-owned & -issued devices (PCs, laptops & mobile), IoT devices & user directories. CAASM solutions scan these assets and identify vulnerabilities & misconfigurations that attackers could exploit. They then help prioritize remediation by assessing asset criticality & the severity of detected vulnerabilities. This enables security teams to quickly identify and focus on the highest-risk assets first, reducing the potential impact of a cyberattack.
Energy & Utilities
The energy and utilities industry must provide safe, reliable, and scalable cyber-resilient power delivery systems. However, the industry is dominated by older technology and many critical physical systems that cannot be upgraded due to geographic distance or costs associated with the process. The result is that companies in the industry need complete visibility into their attack surface, exposing them to threats and making them high-profile targets for attacks. Additionally, the security tools used to secure these assets are often disconnected and unsynchronized — forcing teams to juggle multiple tools for different use cases, leaving them with countless blind spots.
