Harnessing Exposure Management with Continuous Attack Surface Testing 

 
As cyber risks grow, evolve, and become more sophisticated, traditional approaches to cybersecurity are no longer effective. According to research from Gartner, enterprises must move beyond vulnerability management to focus on threat exposure management. Digital transformation, cloud adoption, and other factors are expanding organizations’ attack surfaces and vulnerabilities faster than threat detection and response controls can mature.  

While NetSPI External Attack Surface Management (EASM) doesn’t replace pentesting, a combination of external network penetration testing and EASM can help organizations enable continuous attack surface testing and more effectively focus cybersecurity resources on the most critical gaps in their security posture.  

What is Exposure Management?

From a broad perspective, exposure management is the practice of identifying and analyzing possible exposures and taking steps to minimize the impact of associated risks. While the term exposure management is used broadly in other industries, for the purpose of this article, we’re focusing on exposure management from a cybersecurity lens — also referred to as threat exposure management (TEM) or continuous threat exposure management (CTEM). 

Exposure management in cybersecurity involves seeing the complete, accurate picture of an organization’s attack surface and being prepared to make the right decisions to prioritize remediation and effectively reduce overall cyber risk. The full attack surface includes all points of entry and external-facing assets that a cybercriminal could exploit to gain access to your company data—such as hardware, software, web applications, certificates, unsecured APIs, cloud assets, and much more. 

The Growing Need for Exposure Management 

Attack surfaces continue to expand in today’s connected environment, even overnight. The broader the scope of an attack surface and an organization’s digital footprint, the higher the risk of external-facing assets, exposures, and vulnerabilities.  

Another challenge with exposure management is that organizations often have unknown assets and attack surfaces. As highlighted by Forrester in its report, The External Attack Surface Management Landscape, Q1 2023, “You can’t secure what you can’t see.”

With a proactive approach to exposure management and the right attack surface management solution, organizations can identify previously unknown assets and attack vectors—before attackers do—to avoid exposures.  

Top factors contributing to the increased importance of exposure management include:

1. Attack surface sprawl is on the rise 
2. Unknown assets pose greater risks  
3. Threat actors are becoming more sophisticated

Why Companies are Prioritizing Continuous Attack Surface Testing 

As both known and unknown attack surfaces expand, companies are increasingly using attack surface management tools to bridge the gap between vulnerability management solutions and manual penetration testing.

Traditionally, a common approach has been for organizations to perform penetration testing annually or a few times a year to meet compliance regulations. Following standard pentesting, at times little to no action is taken on the findings for months because security teams lack research-backed prioritization of which vulnerabilities to fix first. This trend is backed with research in NetSPI’s Proactive Security Vision Report, which concluded a lack of resources, aka people, is the number one barrier to timely and effective remediation. 

Attack surfaces and threats can expand and change overnight. Completing only one pentest per year isn’t enough to secure your attack surfaces and protect against new exposures that emerge over the course of a year.  

Instead of relying on periodic pentesting, leverage a combination of external network penetration testing and attack surface management tools to enable continuous attack surface monitoring. Keep pace with expanding attack surfaces to find assets, exposures, and vulnerabilities as they arise. As a result, organizations are better prepared to prioritize and focus their cybersecurity efforts.  

How Continuous Attack Surface Testing Works 

Here’s a step-by-step overview of NetSPI’s process: 

1. NetSPI EASM identifies known and unknown assets to provide visibility of attack surfaces. 
2. Our human pentesters combined with our advanced scanning capabilities validate and prioritize exposures.
3. For each vulnerability, our EASM operations team provides descriptions, severity rankings, remediation steps, and more. 
4. This prioritization reduces the number of false positives reported and creates actionable results for security teams. 

How to Achieve Always-On External Attack Surface Security 

An always-on approach to pentesting is the gold standard for cybersecurity today. External attack surface management tools don’t replace external network penetration testing, as each provide their own strengths and benefits, but pairing the two together works in harmony to enable continuous coverage. This helps organizations achieve higher levels of security in today’s evolving threat landscape.  

As an added benefit, from an operational standpoint, this approach also helps organizations with vendor consolidation. Providers such as NetSPI offer both attack surface management solutions and penetration testing in-house. Businesses that partner with NetSPI have access to an expert team of manual pentesters who complete more than 250,000 hours of pentesting each year. 

Enable Continuous Attack Surface Testing at Scale with NetSPI 

Rather than replacing pentesting, external attack surface management paired with manual external penetration testing is an advanced method for continuous attack surface testing. We created NetSPI EASM to include three offering tiers, carefully designed to meet the unique needs and resources of business in today’s growing, changing cybersecurity landscape. 

• EASM Lite: A fully automated, lightweight EASM solution offering a streamlined, efficient asset discovery tool, tailored to help organizations quickly identify and understand their external attack surface assets and exposures. 

• EASM Standard: Enhanced features and capabilities with expert exposure validation and enhanced platform features to rapidly identify, verify, and prioritize remediation of identified external exposures. 

• EASM Plus: Continuous EASM-powered external penetration testing through a robust solution that delivers ongoing discovery, exposure identification, and consultant-driven penetration testing of an organization’s external attack surface, ensuring comprehensive and up-to-date coverage. 

Leverage NetSPI EASM for expert human analysis to prioritize the most important exposures, bring alignment between security and IT teams, and focus vulnerability remediation efforts to improve security posture and team efficiencies. Try NetSPI’s ASM tool for free!  

NetSPI’s offerings empower all organizations to take concrete, actionable steps toward building a robust CTEM program with the integration of Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM), and Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) delivered through The NetSPI Platform. Request a demo today.