In today’s rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, exposure management has become a critical practice for organizations looking to stay ahead of potential threats. Unlike traditional approaches that focus solely on vulnerabilities, exposure management examines the broader context of how and why specific issues could impact an organization and prioritizes actions based on risk. A key aspect of this practice is understanding the exposure of employees, contractors, and even executives as attackers often attempt to exploit human vulnerabilities as well as critical systems.
What Is Exposure Management?
Exposure management is the process of identifying and prioritizing security risks associated with a given organization’s assets. These assets can be anything from endpoints and applications to users and hardware-each with unique properties that an attacker may attempt to exploit.
By gaining an understanding of these assets and their vulnerabilities, organizations can better manage their attack surface, which makes up all of the potential entry points that a threat actor may leverage to gain access to a network. Without proper controls in place, this attack surface can increase an organizations risk posture.
Exposure Management vs Vulnerability Management
While the goals of exposure management and vulnerability management are to reduce risk, exposure management can be seen as the evolutionary steps from vulnerability management as it takes a more comprehensive approach. Here’s a brief comparison of the two:
- Vulnerability Management: Focuses specifically on vulnerabilities (CVE’s) that are discovered by scanning applications and systems. Often times the results from a vulnerability scan must be manually combined with data from multiple tools in order to prioritize remediation efforts.
- Exposure Management: Considers both CVEs and non-CVEs, as well as data from other sources such as misconfigurations, threats identified in other security tools, and threat intelligence. It frames these risks in terms of business impact, such as remediation costs or the overall risk posed to an organization. Additionally, it accounts for risks tied to human behaviors, such as poor password hygiene or susceptibility to phishing attacks, ensuring organizations can better protect both their systems and their people.
The 4 Key Components of Exposure Management
Effective exposure management leverages existing tools in an organization’s security stack to asses and quantify risks. The lifecycle of exposure management consists of four key components:
- Assessments. Continuous discovery is the foundation of exposure management. By constantly analyzing risk and identifying misconfigurations, organizations can detect policy drift or changes in the threat landscape earlier. This visibility ensures that the security posture remains aligned with these changes.
- Prioritization. After assessments are conducted, risks are then analyzed in the context of their potential impact. Incorporating data about human exposure, such as phishing susceptibility or privileged account misuse, ensure that organizations address critical threat targeting individuals. By modeling these threats and evaluating the current status of security tools, organizations gain valuable insights to prioritize efforts on the most critical issues. This approach ensures that resources are allocated effectively to address risks that have the greatest impact on reducing the overall risk posture.
- Reporting. Clear and actionable reporting provides actionable insights to all stakeholders about technical risks and business priorities. High-level summaries can highlight how effectively particular tools are being used or highlight areas requiring additional time and resources in the future in order to leverage additional capabilities of the product. More detailed reports can guide technical teams on specific misconfigurations or policy adjustments that need to be made.
- Remediation. Implementing solutions to mitigate risk and fix critical gaps to drive down risk is the final step. By automating assessments and integrating reporting with workflows, teams can more easily take action to push policies and changes to mitigate risks and proactively make changes that prepare for future threats that may impact the organization.
Benefits of Exposure Management
Organizations that adopt proactive exposure management typically see numerous benefits, including:
- Prioritized Risk Reduction. Focus on the most critical exposure, ensuring that the highest risks are addressed first.
- Enhance Security Posture. Shift from reactive responses to proactive identification and resolution of risks.
- Improved Efficiency. Streamline processes, enabling teams to focus on what is most critical.
- Compliance Alignment. Simplify the identification and reporting of compliance gaps to meet any regulatory requirements.
Key Takeaways On Exposure Management
Adopting exposure management practices empowers organizations to move beyond reacting to threats and ensure that they remain resilient in the face of an evolving threat landscape. By prioritizing actionable changes and automating processes, teams can efficiently reduce risk and increase their security posture.
While implementing exposure management may seem challenging initially, automating data collection and prioritization can ease the transition. This methodical approach helps organizations protect their assets, align the business on compliance needs and proactively address emerging risks across their attack surface.
