What is not online, cannot be hacked. It is that simple. Attack surface reduction is a key cybersecurity tactic. Making your attack surface lean and agile improves your cyber resilience and demotivates bad actors. The Sweepatic Platform is built to help you with that.
Make your company more cyber resilient
A three step approach:
1. Map all internet-facing assets and check them regularly
Reconnaissance is the first step in the attack planning of cyber criminals; they will gather as much information as they can on the victim organization.
Every organization should fully understand their digital footprint. Ideally, this is on a frequent or continuous basis instead of a best effort or one-off approach. It is important to have an up-to-date and real-live view on running hosts, and control how they are configured, which web applications were introduced online and spot (security) issues, what sensitive documents you have exposed in the cloud, etc.
You need to know what you have, in order to protect it.
2. Embrace automation
Leverage robust and fully managed technology to make the jobs of your IT security teams easier by leaving repetitive analysis to smart machine learning algorithms. Leave complex data collection and processing to purpose build solutions that can scale across your entire business line including 3rd parties. With automation in place, your teams can focus on other, important tasks and help the organization become more resilient.
3. Remove IT that no longer has a business justification
Digitalization is omnipresent. Follow up and monitor this digital transformation in your organization from the start. Control your 3rd parties supporting your line of business. Don’t leave unknown and unnecessary assets lingering around online. Clean out your attack surface systematically. What is no longer needed, remove it from the network so it cannot be hacked.
We’ll dive deeper into the way Sweepatic can help identify attack surface reduction candidates for you.
Attack Surface reduction candidates
How to identify and inventorize candidates for attack surface reduction? The Sweepatic Platform maps your entire attack surface, monitors all your internet-facing assets and identifies candidates for removal.
Websites & domains
From a websites and domains standpoint, the Platform gives insights on which ones might no longer serve a business purpose. Why keep an attack path live to an exposed marketing application running two year old, unpatched 3rd party code?
Similarly, it could be that domains of a brand your company acquired are still lingering online without being updated, secured or tracked. Cleaning up these assets might be a good idea, since they can be entry points for bad actors. When bad scenarios would unfold, the reputation of your business is on the line.
The Sweepatic Platform provides this situational awareness across all your hosts, domains, websites and much more.
3rd party providers
The Sweepatic Platform allows you to identify outliers across your 3rd party provider landscape. It will reveal groups of clusters and outliers only occuring in low numbers that are worthwhile to control, verify and maybe consolidate making your attack surface leaner while saving money on monthly fees.
Shadow IT
Since the Sweepatic Platform provides an overview of your internet “attack surface” perimeter from an outside-in perspective, it shines light on shadow IT. As we stated in our shadow IT blogpost, quite some assets in organizations escape the knowledge and attention of the process and people in charge. Untracked and not managed IT consumes budget unnecessarily and increases security risks.
Track your attack surface evolution
When applying good hygiene by taking care of your attack surface, you are able to track improvements and the progress. Sweepatic has got you covered with the ‘Trends’ views and charts in the Platform. This newly introduced feature set is reporting on the evolution, by aggregating several important asset groups. Thanks to this approach, it allows us to feed Sweepatic’s unique scoring system and summarize the actual state of your attack surface to an ultimate score at any given time. More on this in a later blogpost.
Contact us
We at Sweepatic are continuously innovating and engineering new use cases for our Sweepatic Platform to support our customers in running successful attack surface management programs.
So if we sparked your interest and you would like to know more, schedule your personalized demo with one of our experts and click here!
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