What is exposure management?
Exposure management is when companies identify, assess, and mitigate the risk posed by exposed resources, such as networks, applications, data, and other assets. This risk can lead to unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security incidents.
Exposure management enhances your organization's security posture by helping you safeguard your organization’s exposed resources against cyber threats—before they can be exploited. This approach not only protects your systems and the sensitive information they house but also ensures compliance with regulatory requirements and industry standards.
Underlining the importance of this cybersecurity measure, Gartner has advised companies to expand from managing threats to managing exposure, too.
Are exposures the same as vulnerabilities?
While vulnerabilities and exposures are sometimes used interchangeably, there is a thin line between them. A vulnerability can be seen as a door with a weak lock or one made from weak wood. An exposure, on the other hand, can be seen as a house with a door, be it strong or weak, that is intentionally or inadvertently left open.
Importance of exposure management
Exposure management brings multiple advantages to an organization. Let's explore some of these benefits.
Risk reduction
Exposure management enables early detection and remediation of risks, helping you thwart potential threats before they are exploited by malicious actors. It limits your attack surface and enhances the security posture of your cloud environment.
Facilitated regulatory compliance
By continuously monitoring for vulnerabilities and ensuring that all security protocols and measures are up-to-date, exposure management ensures compliance with industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.
Operational continuity
When an organization swiftly manages exposures within their cloud environment, they prevent exploitations that cause downtime, data loss, or operational inefficiencies. This ensures smooth business operations and continuity.
Cost savings
One of the foremost impacts of a cyberattack is financial: remediation costs, legal fees, regulatory fines, and reputational damage (and the resulting lost revenue). By investing in exposure management, you can mitigate these risks and avoid the hefty costs associated with security incidents.
Improved security posture
The ongoing vigilance of exposure management ensures that organizations adapt to new threats and maintain updated defenses. Regular vulnerability scans, employee training, and implementing advanced security tools for discovery are integral parts of exposure management; they all also contribute to a resilient cybersecurity framework.
The process of exposure management
Managing exposure risk within an organization requires a detailed approach. Below is a breakdown of this process.
Identification
The first step in exposure management is to identify potential exposures within the organization's IT environment. For proper identification:
Use automated tools and vulnerability scanners to perform thorough checks on your systems, networks, applications, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, databases, APIs, and endpoints to uncover potential weaknesses.
Conduct regular security audits and assessments to review configurations, access controls, and overall security policies.
Inventory all your IT assets and categorize them based on criticality.
Check your domain and custom-IP ranges. For example, your SaaS marketing team may have contracted an SaaS offer using the company domain and potentially using company data.
Assessment
Once exposures are identified, the next step is to assess the risk each one poses by taking the following actions:
Assess the likelihood of each exposure being exploited and the potential impact if exploitation occurs.
Prioritize risks based on severity and possible consequences.
Analyze the context of each exposure, including the business functions it affects and the possible scenarios in which it could be exploited.
Mitigation
Risk mitigation strategies include the following:
Apply patches and updates to your software and systems to close security gaps.
Configure security controls. Examples include web application firewalls (WAFs), access controls, and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS).
Divide up your infrastructure using network segmentation to curtail the spread of an attack, limiting the blast radius.
Develop and execute remediation plans tailored to specific vulnerabilities and their unique risks.
Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is a vital step in exposure management and involves the following:
Use an agentless security solution that continuously monitors your environment to identify new potential exposures.
Employ a security solution which offers real-time protection to detect and block any breaches.
Conduct periodic reassessments of your IT environment to identify new exposures.
Evaluate existing controls in terms of their readiness against incidents.
Intelligence
Threat intelligence provides information that you can use to anticipate—and defend against—any and all threats. The following steps are instructive:
Continuously gather threat intelligence from various sources, including threat intelligence feeds, industry reports, cybersecurity communities, and repositories such as the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog and the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) catalog.
Analyze the collected intelligence to uncover trends, patterns, and specific threats relevant to your organization.
Use threat intelligence to make decisions on risk assessments, vulnerability prioritization, and mitigation strategies.
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7 best practices for effective exposure management
For effective exposure management, you’ll need to adopt a set of best practices. The following are commonly advised:
1. Continuously monitor your internal exposure
Conduct regular network and application scans to identify vulnerabilities. Ensuring your network has the latest software will close gaps in your security before hackers exploit them.
2. Implement strategies like the principle of least privilege (PoLP) and separation of duties
Leverage separation of duties to protect your environment.
Enforce the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) for yet another layer of security. This tightens your network because on top of a password, users must also provide proper biometrics or other personal information to gain access.
Another best practice is role-based access control (RBAC), which involves granting users permissions based on specific roles.
Lastly, the principle of least privilege (PoLP) ensures that employees can only access the bare minimum information required to perform their tasks.
Any functions that are not needed within an access area should be disabled to limit the extent of damage if an account is compromised.
3. Automate alerts
Automated alerts will immediately notify you of any exposures or unusual activities within your IT ecosystem. This facilitates prompt responses to threats before they escalate.
Ensure that the predefined security team receives notifications to act swiftly to resolve any identified exposure.
4. Conduct routine security audits
Perform regular security audits to verify the effectiveness of implemented security controls and identify any new exposures. Third-party specialists (e.g., a red team or pen testers) may be a good idea to thoroughly assess your security posture and advise how to boost it.
Maintain detailed records of security audits and use them to track progress, identify trends, and enhance security.
6. Develop a strong incident response plan
You’ll need tried-and-true protocols to follow in the event of a cyberattack. Your incident response plan should provide these, as well as outline what tasks each member of your incident response team is responsible for. This ensures a coordinated handling of an attack should one occur.
Also, don't forget to conduct regular incident response drills to test the plan and familiarize all team members with their roles and necessary procedures.
7. Utilize advanced tools
Invest in advanced cybersecurity solutions that offer comprehensive exposure management, including vulnerability management, asset scanning, threat detection, and incident response capabilities.
The tool should leverage machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), plus offer real-time monitoring and analysis across your organization for fast incident detection and remediation.
8. Conduct training for employees
Regularly train employees on cybersecurity best practices, empowering them to recognize suspicious activities and teaching proper password management. This includes awareness programs that educate them on phishing activities and social engineering. Conduct simulated exercises such as phishing tests to help them practice and reinforce their knowledge in a controlled environment.
A culture of continuous learning and awareness keeps employees informed about the latest threats and security best practices.
How Wiz can help
Wiz helps with exposure management by scanning your environment from the outside to ensure that it's really exposed, determine which resources are exposed, and identify how they got exposed. It supports full network analysis for both containers and cloud platforms, calculating the effective exposure for every cloud in your environment by analyzing network rules.
Wiz examines network configurations, communication patterns, and interdependencies to ensure that every potential point of exposure—as validated from the outside—is scrutinized. It reports and alerts on public-facing resources, limited public-facing resources, and VMs and containers accessible from other subscriptions. Based on this outside-to-inside approach, Wiz offers actionable recommendations that help close any and all gaps and strengthen your overall security posture.
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