Exposure management is the process of identifying, analyzing, and addressing security risks associated with exposed assets. These risks are categorized based on the asset in question, providing security teams with actionable insight into the organization’s overall security posture.
These assets—which include endpoints, applications, cloud resources, and more—all make up the organization’s attack surface. By managing security exposures at the asset level, security professionals can map the organization’s attack surface and quantify security risks more accurately.
Exposure management vs. vulnerability management
Exposure management is often confused with vulnerability management because they describe many of the same activities. They both describe processes for closing security gaps, but in different ways.
- Exposure management practices focus on exploitable access points on the network’s attack surface. It maps and categorizes these devices and their exposures whether they are intentional or not.
- Vulnerability management typically deals with weaknesses in systems or applications, wherever they are in the network. These may include things like cloud misconfigurations or identity and access management policies that are not strictly part of the organization’s external-facing attack surface.
The easiest way to distinguish between the two is by looking at where the potential for security risk originates. Exposure management focuses on the devices and applications along the network perimeter, while vulnerability management analyzes systems working inside the network.
This distinction is important because addressing potential threats on the network perimeter requires a different approach than closing security gaps inside the network. The exposure management lifecycle provides a framework for ensuring external-facing IT assets remain secure.
What is the exposure management lifecycle?
The exposure management lifecycle is a three-phase framework that all successful exposure management programs include. Understanding how each element of the lifecycle fits in your organizational context is key to supporting exposure management activities successfully.
These are the three basic elements of the exposure management lifecycle:
1. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)
CTM provides maximum visibility into IT assets that make up the organization’s attack surface. Continuously monitoring the attack surface for new assets and vulnerabilities ensures the security team can act quickly when new exposures take place.
2. Vulnerability assessment and validation
The attack surface is constantly changing. Exposure assessment is necessary to keep up with those changes and provide security teams with an accurate map of the organization’s interactions with external users and networks. Researching and verifying exposures is the foundation of good exposure management practices.
3. Prioritized remediation plans
Once your team understands the risks that external-facing assets face, you can begin quantifying those risks. This allows you to prioritize exposure management activities according to risk—close the highest-severity security gaps first, and then move on to the ones less likely to result in significant damage.
Why do security leaders invest in exposure management?
Exposure management does more than list the organization’s exposures to cybercriminals and threat actors. It provides positive effects that impact the organization’s ability to detect and respond to threats.
Some of the benefits associated with professional exposure management include:
- Better informed decisions. The ability to quantify risk associated with threat exposure makes it easier for security practitioners to make the right decisions. It reduces the amount of time that goes into decision-making during time-sensitive moments like active cyberattack scenarios.
- Improved communication between security stakeholders. Properly scoping exposures according to risk value helps executives and other stakeholders communicate clearly about security risks. This helps non-technical leaders see the bottom-line benefit of reducing exposure risks.
- Stronger security posture. The ability to prioritize and remediate security exposures improves the speed and accuracy of security actions and policies. This puts the organization in a stronger, more compliant security posture.
- Automated access control. Exposure management gives security teams the ability to pinpoint and remediate exposures that should not exist. That helps organizations automate control over who can access the network and block users who should not have access.
5 steps to successful exposure management
Successful exposure management is a systematic process. Your security team will have to purposefully work through your organization’s entire attack surface to categorize potential threats and create solutions to protect against those threats.
1. Identify exposed assets
Your organization has a wide range of assets that can interact with external users and networks. The first step of exposure management is identifying these assets, which may include:
- Web applications
- Cloud APIs
- Hardware endpoint devices
- DNS records
- Cloud computing instances or storage
All of these assets play a role in defining your organization’s attack surface. Once you have them all identified, you can begin mapping and prioritizing them accordingly.
2. Map the attack surface
When you have a full inventory of your organization’s IT assets, you can begin ranking them according to their vulnerability to exploitation. Some examples of exploitation exposures include:
- Publicly accessible services
- Open ports
- The ability to transmit sensitive data off the network
- Application vulnerabilities
- Security flaws in the operating system
Ranking all of these potential vulnerabilities creates a comprehensive map of your organization’s attack surface and its exposure to risk. Now you can think like an attacker and identify what assets are likely to be targeted first.
3. Assess risk
Consider your organization’s attack surface and imagine what assets threat actors might target first. Cybercriminals are likely to focus on assets that handle sensitive data and have severe security vulnerabilities that can be exploited easily.
Each of your assets falls somewhere along the spectrum between being high risk and low risk. You may need to consult with threat intelligence databases and spend time understanding cybercriminal tactics, techniques, and procedures to gain a good understanding of which assets are likely to represent the highest risk.
4. Prioritize and mitigate exposures
Once you have a good idea of the risk profile of each asset in your network perimeter, you can prioritize the remediation of those risk exposures. This step will provide you with a clear roadmap to better operational security, showing you which risks to mitigate first.
Your organization’s IT and security teams can then work together to close those security gaps. This involves patching vulnerabilities, configuring ports, and editing access control policies. You may even take some assets offline entirely.
5. Continuous monitoring
Your organization’s attack surface is not static. It changes constantly as business units develop new tools and solutions to meet challenges and generate value for users. Proper exposure management requires monitoring those new developments for security risks in a continuous manner.
This is also a common requirement for organizations pursuing compliance standards like PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and FedRAMP. Continuous monitoring allows the organization to demonstrate it is committed to securing external-facing assets against cyberattacks in real-time.
Improve exposure management for your organization
Novawatch provides exposure management services to organizations pursuing regulatory compliance and security goals. Our team will help you leverage automation to control your attack surface and reduce risk without drawing in-house security resources away from business-critical tasks.
Let our team help you automate exposure management, reduce your security risk profile, and demonstrate compliance. Speak to a specialist to find out more about our exposure management services.
