What is attack path analysis?
Attack path analysis (APA), a cutting-edge approach that can predict attacker strategies, identifies and maps how potential attackers could infiltrate your network and systems. APA involves detecting various vulnerabilities and misconfigurations as well as loosely defined access control mechanisms that threat actors can exploit to compromise your system.
What are attack vectors and attack paths?
Attack vectors and attack paths are two crucial concepts in cybersecurity, and it’s important to understand their difference.
An attack path involves a sequence of steps executed by hackers to breach a network or system. It flags the vulnerabilities an attacker could exploit, different tools that could be used, and possible actions they could take for lateral movement to reach a high-value asset.
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A publicly accessible resource with a critical vulnerability and an exposed secret could grant attackers extensive privileges, including the ability to view or exfiltrate personally identifiable information (PII). An attack graph helps you see the relationship between different components and the movement of threats in an attack path; it shows a network, systems, connections, and vulnerabilities. Consider it a blueprint of your network, outlining all the pathways that attackers could exploit.
Attack vectors are methods or tools that malicious actors use to get initial access to a system or network. These are the entry points exploited by hackers to start the infiltration. Examples include malware, unpatched software, and weak passwords. Once the attacker accesses your network through an attack vector, the attack path details the steps they take to laterally move through the system and access critical assets.
Benefits of attack path analysis
With the cloud’s continuously changing threat landscape, the number of attacks involving attack vectors such as malware, zero-day vulnerabilities, and data leakage is on the rise. That’s why security teams need sophisticated tools such as attack path analysis to stay ahead of the game. APA is not just about visualization; it’s also a powerful tool for security teams to evaluate the potential impact of attack scenarios.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits it offers.
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Proactive threat management | Attack path analysis provides a significant advantage when it comes to cybersecurity, enabling you to anticipate potential threats and attack routes before an incident strikes. By evaluating your cloud resource configurations, vulnerabilities, and access controls, you can put essential guardrails in place before attackers find and exploit any weaknesses. |
| Prioritized vulnerability management | By understanding attack paths, you can prioritize vulnerabilities that should be mitigated first. Vulnerabilities that are on attack paths leading to critical assets pose a higher risk and need to be addressed immediately. APA helps you tailor your vulnerability management approach, which is important in dynamically changing cloud environments. |
| Targeted defense | Attack path analysis helps identify security gaps, i.e., your most vulnerable systems and open configurations. With information surfaced by attack path analysis, you can reinforce those specific areas. For example, if an attack path focuses on exploiting specific software to execute a privilege escalation, you can implement additional controls or upgrade the program to make it difficult for hackers to exploit it. |
| Improved resource allocation | When a cloud estate is large or when security resources are limited, you have to prioritize where to invest in security. Attack path analysis helps allocate resources more efficiently so that you can address the most critical issues first and get the most out of your cybersecurity investments. |
The Cloud Threat Landscape
The Cloud Threat Landscape is a threat intelligence database that summarizes cloud incidents and offers insights into targeting patterns and initial access methods.
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Analyzing and prioritizing attack paths with Wiz
Hackers today are finding new and sophisticated attack vectors to infiltrate your cloud environments irrespective of how many guardrails you’ve put in place or how strong your vulnerability management process is. Traditional security management solutions can provide you with a list of findings, but the onus is on you to identify risks that are still relevant and then focus on the most critical ones.
Because time is of the essence, this approach is no longer effective in the fast-changing cloud landscape. That’s where Wiz can be your trusted partner for securing cloud deployments.
Wiz delivers a comprehensive attack path analysis solution, providing you visibility on how attackers can potentially move within your environment and also the external exposures that could serve as their entry points to high-value assets. It provides much-needed contextual views based on connected resources and events that help you plug the most critical security gaps.
Wiz Security Graph
The Wiz Security Graph represents an industry-first automated APA capability that can help you visualize potential breach pathways.
With Wiz, you get a clear picture of where and how an attacker could infiltrate your environment. However, it doesn't stop there: The Security Graph combines external exposures like internet-facing vulnerabilities and identifies the paths of least resistance available for an attacker to move laterally and compromise critical assets.
In the backend, Wiz uses a single graph database across multi-cloud deployments, meaning it can help you identify complex relationships even across different clouds. This capability becomes a differentiating factor if you have a diverse multi-cloud landscape, which is the case in most large-scale cloud deployments. Organizations often opt for the best of each cloud provider and are restricted by a lack of visibility from a security perspective, but Wiz can solve this problem by surfacing the attack pathways hackers may potentially exploit across any cloud resources.
The Wiz APA method extends to AI models as well, offering additional context to attack paths via information about identities, malware, network exposures, secrets, and more. For instance, an attacker could use an application with a known vulnerability to connect to a storage bucket used for AI training and manipulate the data. Wiz will help you proactively identify these AI attack paths to prevent the rising number of AI-related threats.
Actionable insights from Wiz
Wiz doesn’t just provide you with visibility into attack paths, it also empowers you to take action. By analyzing attack paths, Wiz offers contextual information on vulnerabilities, access control issues, and misconfigurations. It also features remediation and real-time response capabilities, like terminating a compromised virtual machine, disconnecting it from the network, or detaching access control permissions.
When misconfigurations are identified, you can review them and use the one-click workflow resolution option to fix them. Or, create custom response functions to execute remediation steps based on internal processes and workflows.
Wiz’s actionable insights and automated responses let you mitigate the most critical vulnerabilities fast.
Wiz risk-scoring methodology
Wiz uses a risk-based vulnerability management approach that leverages your organizational security requirements to prioritize vulnerabilities. This is a paradigm shift compared to traditional security management solutions, which use generic prioritization and analyze how a vulnerability is being exploited in the wild without business-specific context.
Instead, Wiz scoring methodology takes into account the probability of a vulnerability being exploited in your given cloud environment. The score is based on several factors: severity, asset criticality, exposure, threat intelligence, compliance requirements, and business impact.
This is then integrated with Wiz’s comprehensive vulnerability management catalog, covering all your applications and operating systems across different cloud environments. This way, you get a single-pane view of potential risks across your cloud estate.
Super-charge your cloud security with Wiz attack path analysis
Staying ahead of threat actors in the cloud requires you to step up your defenses and upgrade your security arsenal. In addition to staying up-to-date about the latest threats, you also need to have a clear view of how strong or weak your defenses are against sophisticated attack vectors.
Wiz’s automated attack path analysis can be your trusted security sidekick, providing a clear blueprint of the weak points in your environment and how attackers could exploit them to compromise your resources.
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