What is attack path analysis?
Attack path analysis is a security methodology that identifies and maps potential routes attackers could use to compromise your systems. This approach goes beyond individual vulnerability scanning by revealing how misconfigurations, weak access controls, and security gaps connect to create exploitable pathways.
By analyzing these interconnected risks, APA helps security teams understand not just what vulnerabilities exist, but which combinations pose the greatest threat to critical assets.
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What are attack vectors and attack paths?
Attack paths represent the complete sequence of steps an attacker follows to compromise systems and reach high-value targets. These paths connect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and weak access controls into exploitable routes through your environment.
Attack vectors are the initial entry points attackers use to gain access—such as malware, unpatched software, or weak passwords. Think of vectors as the door, while paths are the route through your building.
Attack graphs visualize these relationships by mapping how different components connect and where threats can move. They serve as blueprints showing all potential pathways attackers could exploit to reach critical assets.
The key distinction: vectors get attackers in, paths show them where to go next.
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How does attack path analysis work?
Attack path analysis works by modeling the relationships between different components in a cloud environment to identify potential chains of exploitation. The process generally follows several key stages:
Asset and risk discovery: The first step is to gain complete visibility into all cloud resources, including workloads, identities, configurations, and data. The system scans for a wide range of risks, such as vulnerabilities, exposed secrets, misconfigurations, and excessive permissions.
Graph-based mapping: Once risks are identified, they are mapped onto a security graph. This graph connects resources and shows how different risks relate to one another. For example, it can show how a virtual machine with a public IP address (a network exposure) and a high-severity vulnerability could be linked to an over-privileged identity.
Path identification: The system then analyzes the graph to trace potential sequences of actions an attacker could take. It looks for 'toxic combinations'—multiple, seemingly low-risk issues that, when chained together, create a high-impact path to a critical asset like a database with sensitive data or an admin account.
Prioritization: Finally, the identified attack paths are prioritized based on their potential impact. Paths that lead to crown jewel assets or provide an attacker with elevated privileges are flagged as critical, allowing security teams to focus their remediation efforts on the threats that matter most.
Modern CNAPP solutions like Wiz automate this entire process, using the Wiz Security Graph to continuously map these connections and prioritize the attack paths that actually lead to your critical assets. This provides a clear, contextual view of risk that is more actionable than a simple list of individual vulnerabilities.
Benefits of attack path analysis
Attack path analysis transforms reactive security into proactive defense by revealing how individual vulnerabilities combine to create serious threats. Rather than managing thousands of isolated security findings, teams can focus on the combinations that actually matter.
Cloud environments amplify this challenge. Dynamic infrastructure and interconnected services create complex attack surfaces where traditional security approaches fall short. APA addresses this by mapping real-world attack scenarios, helping teams understand not just what's broken, but what's actually exploitable.
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. |
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Analyzing and prioritizing attack paths with Wiz
Traditional security tools create alert fatigue without context. They generate thousands of findings but leave security teams to manually determine which combinations pose real threats. This reactive approach fails in dynamic cloud environments where attack paths constantly evolve.
Modern attackers exploit these gaps by chaining together seemingly minor issues into major breaches. For example, attackers in 2020 used compromised employee credentials for a third-party app to access more than five million guest records at a hotel chain. Similarly, a misconfigured storage bucket becomes dangerous when combined with excessive permissions and network exposure—but traditional tools treat each issue in isolation.
Wiz solves this by automatically mapping these connections and prioritizing the attack paths that actually lead to your critical assets.
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 automatically identifies exploitable attack paths across your entire cloud environment. Instead of managing isolated security findings, you see exactly how attackers could chain vulnerabilities together to reach critical assets.
The graph connects external exposures – like internet-facing services – with internal weaknesses such as excessive permissions and misconfigurations. This reveals the paths of least resistance attackers would actually use, enabling you to disrupt these routes before they're exploited.
Wiz provides unified attack path visibility across all major cloud providers. The platform uses a single graph database to map relationships between AWS, Azure, GCP, and other cloud resources—something traditional tools struggle with.
This multi-cloud approach is crucial because modern organizations typically use different providers for different needs. Without unified visibility, security teams miss attack paths that span across cloud boundaries, leaving dangerous gaps in their defense strategy.
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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