As organizations increasingly move towards digital transformation, their attack surfaces have grown larger and more complex every passing day.

This, in turn, is creating new opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities and gain access to sensitive data. 

To stay ahead of these threats, organizations must take a proactive approach to their security posture and improve their attack surface visibility for attack surface reduction.

That’s where cyber asset management (CAM) comes in.

In this blog post, we’ll take a deep dive into CAM and explore how it can help you improve your organization’s attack surface visibility so that you can stay one step ahead of cybercriminals and protect your sensitive data from theft and exposure.

What is attack surface?

Attack surface refers to all the entry points a cybercriminal can exploit to gain unauthorized access to your organization’s network such as hardware, software, web applications, APIs, and any form of cyber assets.

The larger the attack surface of your organization’s network, the greater the risk of a successful cyber attack. 

That’s why it’s critical for organizations to invest in modern security solutions like CAM or CAASM to gain a complete visibility over their attack surface so that they can take necessary steps to minimize attack surface area and remediate all vulnerabilities.

What is attack surface visibility?

Attack surface visibility is the ability of an organization to gain comprehensive insight into its attack surface and to identify all the potential vulnerabilities, entry points, and weak spots that a cybercriminal could exploit.

With attack surface visibility, organizations can proactively identify and address security vulnerabilities, implement effective attack surface management strategies, and reduce the likelihood of successful cyberattacks. 

Attack surface visibility can be achieved through various cybersecurity tools and practices (i.e. Cybersecurity Asset Management).

If you’re not familiar with cyber asset management (CAM), let’s understand what is it and how does it work.

Afterwards, we will discuss how CAM can improve attack surface visibility and what steps you need to take to make it happen.

What is cyber asset management (CAM)?

Cyber asset management (CAM) is the process of identifying, tracking, and managing an organization’s cyber assets and associated risks & vulnerabilities to improve cybersecurity.

The goal of CAM is to provide a comprehensive view of an organization’s attack surface and to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities and risks associated with their digital assets. 

This enables organizations to implement effective security controls and risk management strategies, gain complete attack surface visibility, minimize attack surface, reduce the likelihood of successful cyberattacks, and protect their sensitive data.

Why is CAM important in improving attack surface visibility?

As a critical component of any organization’s cybersecurity strategy, cyber asset management (CAM) is essential in improving attack surface visibility. By discovering, inventorying, and classifying all digital assets, CAM can provide organizations with a better understanding of their attack surface and the associated risks and vulnerabilities.

With  these insights, organizations can prioritize their security efforts and focus on attack vectors reduction by mitigating the most critical risks.

Additionally, CAM can also provide ongoing monitoring and attack surface management of an organization’s digital assets to detect new vulnerabilities and potential risks as they arise and to ensure that security measures are continually updated and optimized.

So by implementing CAM effectively, organizations can improve their attack surface visibility, mitigate risks, and protect their sensitive data & information from cyber attacks.

Steps to improve attack surface visibility with CAM

Now that you know why CAM is important in improving the attack surface visibility of an organization’s network, let’s talk about the steps you need to take for accomplishing this.

Step 1 – Identify attack surface

The first step in improving attack surface visibility is to identify all of the potential entry points that attackers could use to gain access to an organization’s systems and data.

This includes not just the obvious entry points, such as internet-facing servers and applications, but also less obvious areas, such as unsecured wireless access points, third-party vendors, and even physical access points.

For example, if your organization is making an inventory of all devices connected to its network such as IoT devices, servers, cloud storage, and other endpoints, make sure to consider the third-party vendors and assess their security posture as well.

Step 2 – Use CAM to map out the attack surface

Once you’ve identified the attack surface of your organization’s network, the next step is to use a CAM tool to map out the attack surface and gain a comprehensive view of all digital assets.

For example, if you want to identify all digital assets in your organization’s environment, a robust CAM tool can provide a complete view of all hardware devices, operating systems, software applications, and cloud services in use. 

This, in turn, will enable your organization to understand the scope of their attack surface and identify any assets that may have been overlooked in the initial identification stage.

Step 3 – Use CAM to monitor the attack surface

After mapping out the attack surface, it’s critical to continually monitor the digital assets to detect new vulnerabilities and potential risks as they arise. 

A CAM tool can help with ongoing monitoring and management of your organization’s digital assets to identify potential vulnerabilities and threats quickly.

Let’s assume that you want to scan your organization’s environment for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. 

Using a CAM tool, you can set up continuous monitoring and real-time alerts on any new vulnerabilities that are discovered, which will allow you to take quick actions to minimize attack surface area and remediate the issues.

Step 4 – Analyze and prioritize vulnerabilities

Once you’ve set up continuous monitoring to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities, the next thing you need to do is analyze and prioritize. 

Most CAM tools always provide detailed information about each cyber asset such as location, configuration, operating system, threat level, severity of vulnerabilities, and other relevant information.

This, in turn, can be used to assess and prioritize based on their criticality and potential impact on your organization’s network.

Simply put, you can use a CAM tool to conduct a network-wide vulnerability assessment on all your cyber assets. 

The tool will then provide you with a comprehensive report, highlighting the most critical vulnerabilities to help prioritize remediation efforts based mainly on the potential impact of each vulnerability on your organization’s environment.

Step 5 – Remediate vulnerabilities to minimize attack surface

In the final step, you need to mitigate all the identified threats and vulnerabilities for attack surface reduction and improve overall visibility. 

To minimize attack surface area and gain better visibility, you need to patch or upgrade software, remove unnecessary or unused applications, improve your security policies & procedures, and implement additional security controls.

For example, if you’ve discovered a vulnerability in a particular software application, leverage a CAM tool to automate the patching process. 

Additionally, you can also use the tool to scan your organization’s environment for any hardware devices that are running outdated software version that is highly vulnerable and deploy the latest patches to those devices.

Doing so will enable you to remediate the vulnerabilities and minimize attack surface to prevent successful cyber attacks.

Conclusion

As we have explained, improving attack surface visibility is critical for modern organizations to stay one step ahead of hackers and keep cyber assets secure.

By leveraging the powerful capabilities of a CAM tool, organizations can easily identify, prioritize, and mitigate any potential threats & vulnerabilities lying in their network before they can be exploited.

However, it’s important to know that CAM is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to cybersecurity. While it’s certainly an essential tool, it’s not a silver bullet. 

That’s why organizations must invest in other emerging cybersecurity solutions like CAASM (Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management) along with employee education, incident response planning, and so on for attack surface reduction & to build a holistic security program.

By combining CAM with other cybersecurity measures and solutions, organizations can remain vigilant against new threats and keep their sensitive information safe.

FAQs

Cybersecurity is rapidly becoming a critical concern for organizations around the world. 

With the rise in remote working, digital transformation, and cloud as well as SaaS adoption, the attack surfaces in most organizations are growing at a breakneck speed, making it increasingly difficult to define, let alone defend!

Because of this, virtually any cyber asset in an organization’s environment can now be used as an entry point for a cyber attack. 

This is why it is now imperative for organizations to improve their attack surface visibility across all their cyber assets and manage it more effectively through a comprehensive solution like CAASM.

For the uninitiated, CAASM is an acronym for Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management. It allows you to gain complete & comprehensive visibility across the entire attack surface of your organization’s network.

But, in order to leverage CAASM to its full potential, you need to first understand everything about attack surface management.

In this post, we’ve explained everything there is to know about attack surface management, including its definition, importance, types, and solution.

But before we get to that, let’s briefly understand what an attack surface means.

What is Attack Surface?

The attack surface refers to all attack vectors that hackers can exploit to gain unauthorized access and manipulate an organization’s IT infrastructure. 

In other words, the attack surface of an organization is generally made of up four different types of cyber assets including:

• On-Premise Assets – These are on-site assets like devices, servers, and other hardware equipment.
• Cloud Assets – These include cloud servers, SaaS applications, cloud storage & databases, and any other assets that leverage cloud technology.
• Unknown Assets – These assets are often referred to as “shadow assets” and usually include any kind of assets that are not under attack surface security monitoring but are part of an organization’s IT infrastructure.
• Rogue Assets – These are malicious assets that hackers target to exploit an organization’s network, gain unauthorized access, and steal company data.
• Vendors – Vendors are assets that your organization has purchased from an external vendor or partner. 

Note that your organization’s attack surface will grow as you add new devices, users, and assets to its network. 

This is why it’s critical to continuously monitor and evaluate all cyber assets present in your organization’s environment to discover, identify, and remediate vulnerabilities before they are exploited by hackers.

And this is where the attack surface management enters the scene.

What is Attack Surface Management?

Attack surface management is a cybersecurity process that involves continuous discovery, identification, classification, prioritization, and monitoring of all cyber assets in an organization’s IT infrastructure. 

Using ASM, organizations can mimic the mindset as well as the toolset of hackers and improve attack surface visibility across all potential entry points and strengthen the security posture of their network.

In simple words, ASM can easily identify vulnerabilities and assess risks based on the opportunities they would give to the hackers if exploited successfully. 

Types of Attack Surface Management

There are two main types of attack surface management.

Internal Attack Surface Management

As the name suggests, internal attack surface management is a process of managing activities of cyber assets that are only reachable within the organization. 

It focuses on improving the attack surface security posture of an organization’s internal assets by discovering & remediating vulnerabilities to reduce the overall attack surface.

This, in turn, helps to prevent hackers from discovering and exploiting weak attack vectors in an organization’s network.

External Attack Surface Management

External attack surface management focuses mostly on managing internet-facing assets such as web applications, outside vendors, and remote users in an organization’s network. 

It narrows down every single attack vector that is vulnerable by systematically discovering, identifying, sorting, and allocating a risk score and then remediating the threat altogether. 

The goal of external attack surface management is to mitigate risks from external sources and prevent cyberattacks through regular penetration testing, incident response planning, and threat remediation.

Why is Attack Surface Management Important?

Now that you know what attack surface management is and its types, it’s time to talk about why it is important for every organization to implement it.

Reducing Risk

Attack surface management helps organizations map all their cyber assets to identify and address potential threats before they can be exploited by hackers. 

By leveraging ASM, organizations can continuously monitor their networks and environment for vulnerabilities and gain visibility into attack surface security gaps that are critical and need to be addressed.

This visibility enables organizations to respond to all threats and vulnerabilities proactively rather than wait for a breach or incident to occur before taking any action.

Complying with Regulatory Requirements

In many industries, there are certain regulatory requirements related to cybersecurity like PCI DSS, NIS, NIS2, DORA, and so on that must be complied with.

Attack surface management helps organizations comply with the applicable regulatory requirements by making sure that all systems are secure. 

Organizations are even free to use automated tools or manual processes to assess their regulatory compliance status on a continuous basis with the help of attack surface management.

Protecting Sensitive Data

Another reason to adopt attack surface management is that it helps organizations to protect sensitive data by discovering potential threats associated with its storage as well as transmission.

For instance, if a system of an organization contains confidential information about its customers but does not have appropriate authentication measures in place, hackers could easily gain unauthorized access to this information.

But by implementing appropriate authentication measures through ASM, organizations mitigate the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive customer information and prevent any chances of a cyberattack.

Besides, protecting customers’ personal and sensitive data is also a regulatory requirement. GDPR, for example, imposes businesses to keep their customers’ data safe if they’re EU citizens or residents.

Maintain Customers’ Trust

Customers only conduct business with organizations that protect their personal or company information. In fact, customers will only continue doing business with your organization in the future if they feel confident that their information is safe and protected by your organization.

This is why it is essential for organizations to maintain their customers’ trust and protect their data from theft or misuse. 

And in this case, attack surface management can help to protect the sensitive and personal data of your customers from any threats or vulnerabilities by mitigating the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.

Protect Organization’s Reputation

Last but not least, attack surface management can play a vital role in protecting the reputation of your organization.

As you might already know, a single cyberattack can have severe consequences for an organization, and not just financial losses or confidential data theft, but it can ruin its reputation with customers, investors, partners, and other key stakeholders.

This is because a successful cyberattack on a large organization instantly makes headlines in the news and online media which can tarnish the reputation, diminish brand image, and cause customers to lose confidence.

Attack surface management can help to prevent such incidents from happening by remediating all vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by hackers.

This, in turn, ensures that your organization’s reputation remains intact and your customers continue to trust and have faith in your products and services.

How Does ASM Protect Organizations from Cyber Attacks?

As you have just learned, attack surface management puts organizations in a better position from a cybersecurity standpoint to strengthen weak attack surface areas and prevent cyberattacks.

But how exactly does ASM provide protection from cyberattacks to organizations? 

Turns out, there are several phases involved in attack surface management that help organizations to attain effective protection against cyberattacks.

Discovering Assets

In this initial phase, organizations leverage ASM to discover, identify, and map all cyber assets across both internal & external attack surfaces. 

Additionally, modern attack surface management solutions can even mimic the toolset leveraged by hackers to find potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses in your organization’s network.

This drastically enhances the overall visibility across the totality of the attack surface and ensures that all cyber assets have been mapped, which could have been used as a potential attack vector.

Continuous Testing

The attack surface continuously changes as new devices, assets, and users are added to the network. Because of this, it is imperative that your ASM solution can conduct continuous monitoring and testing of the attack surface.

An ideal attack surface management solution should be able to review and assess all assets 24/7 to prevent any attack surface security gaps, vulnerabilities, and threats while eliminating system misconfigurations and other similar risks. 

Understanding Context

As you may already know, any cyber asset can serve as an attack vector for a cyber attack but not all assets carry the same level of risk to an organization. 

A modern attack surface management solution can conduct a thorough analysis of the attack surface and provide relevant insights about exposed assets and their context within an organization’s network.

These insights include when, where, and how an exposed asset was used, who is the owner of the asset, its IP address, network connection points, and a few other factors that could potentially help in determining the seriousness of the risk posed to the organization.

Prioritizing Vulnerabilities

To protect your organization’s network against potential cyberattacks, discovering & mapping all cyber assets is not enough. Organizations must also have a way to prioritize which existing threats, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities to remediate first. 

This is where the attack surface management comes into the picture. An effective ASM solution should provide actionable risk scoring based on certain factors like how visible & exploitable a vulnerability is, how complex it is to fix it, and the history of exploitation.

Unlike traditional vulnerability management methods like penetration testing or red teaming whose security ratings can be subjective, attack surface management scoring is based on calculated criteria. 

In other words, ASM uses a preset system of data and parameters to determine the severity of vulnerabilities and prioritizes them accordingly.

Remediating Potential Threats

Based on the previous four phases of attack surface management, the IT & security teams of an organization will now be equipped with the necessary information to identify the highest severity risks and prioritize their remediation efforts. 

Since the remediation efforts are usually led by IT professionals, it is critical to make sure that this information is shared with each team member and that they’re all aligned on security operations.

Typically, the remediation process often involves applying the latest operating system patches, implementing a stronger encryption method, debugging application code, eliminating rogue assets, and so on.

End Note

As organizations are rapidly embracing a digital transformation agenda, it has become nearly impossible for them to obtain & maintain visibility of the growing attack surface using legacy solutions.

The adoption of cloud workloads, microservices, SaaS applications, and other digital solutions has amplified the complexity of an organization’s IT environment, making it challenging to detect cyber threats, let alone respond to them. 

To identify and remediate an evolving array of cyber threats and regain complete visibility over an organization’s attack surface, it is mandatory to continuously monitor, detect, identify, and prioritize vulnerabilities.

In this situation, Scrut’s CAASM solution can help you gain complete visibility of all your cyber assets, and empower your IT and security teams to identify & overcome all cybersecurity challenges.

FAQs

Scrut recently organized a conference with some of the brightest cyber minds in the country in attendance. The conference was centered around a panel discussion titled ‘The Emerging Need for Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management’ and discussed the various phenomena that makes CAASM a must for organizations in the present day. 

For CISOs, this conference—which was put out in association with Dataquest India—was undoubtedly a high point. Security professionals took the platform to discuss asset management, surface security, and how cybersecurity affects our everyday life. They also discussed how a joint collaboration among the organizations could strengthen resistance against cyberattacks.

Let’s look at the conference’s core discussion points and what our speakers had to say about the emerging CAASM needs. 

How does CAASM address Asset Vulnerability? 

Cyber dangers remain a key concern for management and boards, as well as investors and other stakeholders in the organization. As more breaches, ransomware, malware, and other threats emerge, the risk curve keeps getting steeper.

In his introductory remarks, Dataquest Editor Sunil Rajguru provided a timeline of how connections, networks, and cybersecurity have evolved through time. He said the “last four years have felt like 20 years for cybersecurity.” 

Due to factors like ubiquitous Internet access, the world has undergone a significant transformation recently. In a matter of decades, the Internet completely altered the global landscape. Yet, cyber threats and attacks also rise sharply as more individuals get linked.

Asset mapping is a universal challenge

Aayush Ghosh Choudhury, CEO and Co-founder of Scrut, took the stage next to bring the focus on some of the problems organizations in the industry are consistently facing. In his opening keynote address, Aayush provided a few examples of problems, such as
“What is asset telemetry, and how do we maintain it? How do we keep this agentless and ensure fast time to value?”

He then implied that new resources get deployed day in and day out, making it extremely difficult for organizations to be aware of their asset surface at a given point in time. Even though every compliance framework and regulation has a requirement for managing assets, most organizations need more confidence to translate it into action points for mapping the asset surface. 

Adopting the DevOps approach

In his speech on “Understanding the Importance of CAASM,” Arumugam Palani, Principal, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), highlighted the role of the pandemic in driving and accelerating digital transformation throughout traditional and non-traditional organizations. 

He also rightfully mentioned that success is all about adopting a DevOps mindset that focuses on how things can function along with solving potential obstacles.

He emphasized that from the perspective of cybersecurity, a fundamental and cross-cutting horizontal pipe that guarantees every asset, and code, as well as inbound and outbound communication passes through numerous systems and equations is necessary.

After all, Implementing security most seamlessly is vital to building a secure organization. Not just CISOs, but every organization member should study the blueprint clearly, adopting a key position in identifying focus areas. 

Before asset management comes asset visibility 

The discussion further shifted from the DevOps approach to tackling real-time problems. Satish Kumar Dwibhashi, one of the panel members at the conference, mentioned that the tech world, as we know it, is evolving super fast, which significantly impacted how organizations manage their assets. 

One of the major challenges organizations faces while safeguarding their assets is that of the unknown, which can only be rectified by identifying all assets. 

When there are numerous complex clouds, finding the assets gets more challenging., As quoted by Satish, ‘Even large enterprises struggle with understanding their assets.’ But it is important to remember that security starts with assets, and this is where CAASM comes in. Identifying assets will directly help organizations identify their primary risks.

Asset classification is a second problem. You first identify your assets and then go into threats and vulnerabilities to understand how they can be exploited. 

Businesses will continue to experience new attacks, says Satish. Consider your blind spots, he added, since at the time of an attack, keeping an eye on security dashboards and consoles becomes challenging. There should be absolute visibility because a quick response is essential. 

Understanding the cruciality of CAASM

Jason Joseph, CISO at Signdesk, followed Satish’s statement by saying that asset management is essential in the given security scenario. The complexity of each block brought on by shifting data governance and geographic concerns is forcing CISOs to step back and take a fresh look at asset management. 

He was also seen advising people in the room, saying, “Set up a perimeter, then defend it. Asset management is known as both traditional and non-traditional.”

Aayush also commented on the ongoing discussion saying, “I can attest to the difficulties of the CISO position in terms of asset upkeep and asset counting after witnessing various firms. We think that real-time visibility is a useful tool for mid-market businesses, especially since Assets are tangible objects that are fluid to the touch.”

Importance of mapping and CAASM as a tool 

When asked about the importance of asset mapping, Jason Joseph commented saying, “we are no longer within our boundaries. There is a hybrid, and the attack surface is multiplying. When an endpoint is inadequately mapped, small and medium-sized networks cannot address it. CISOs concerned with security will be aware of the assets and alarms but may not know what to do. The future of CAASM lies in prioritizing the asset and mitigating vulnerability.”

This statement was further supported by Nitin Kotwal, Head of Security, MoEngage, and Pratyush Kukreja, Business Head—APAC, Scrut Automation, titled: Simplifying your Compliance Journey with CAASM during their fireside chat. Nitin pointed out that the first step towards mapping is to analyze the method or tool you use for it. 

Organizations must question how viability is incorporated. How well can it combine IT and cloud solutions to collect all the assets and always verify them? Does it offer customization? Before selecting an asset management tool. 

Concluding the conference with a resourceful solution 

As we neared the end of the conference, it became clear that the end state is to proactively employ CAASM to contain the risk and be continuously compliant. All attending cybersecurity experts were in unanimous agreement that CAASM is not only the best solution but a necessary tool for organizations in the evolving digital landscape. 

One such tool is Scrut’s CAASM which enables you to obtain visibility into all of your cyber assets, helping IT and security teams to tackle cyber asset vulnerability concerns and create a solid platform for all security efforts.

You can use Scrut CAASM to streamline your distributed cloud environment assets and identify potential risks, therein reducing your attack surface. 

With the rise of digitization, organizations are rapidly shifting towards cloud-based software, SaaS applications, and remote working.

This massive shift is now forcing organizations to change how they approach the security of their cyber assets and overall risk management.

That’s because any cyber asset in an organization, whether it’s cloud-based or otherwise, is a potential entry point for a cyber attack.

Moreover, since organizations are adopting new cyber assets rapidly, it has broadened the attack surfaces significantly. 

As a result, it has now become more difficult for organizations to prepare for and manage rising cyber threats in their environment. 

In order to strengthen cybersecurity, organizations must adopt a reliable Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management solution.

More importantly, organizations must understand the difference between vulnerability management and attack surface management and figure out how to implement both correctly.

In this post, we have explained what is vulnerability management & attack surface management, the key differences between the two approaches, and which is better for organizations in 2023.

What is a Vulnerability?

A Vulnerability in cybersecurity space is referred to as a weak spot in a network’s surface that can be easily exploited. 

In simple words, a vulnerability is a flaw or misconfiguration in a specific asset with an IP address that attackers can hack to breach an organization’s cybersecurity defenses.

Some of the most common examples of vulnerabilities include —

• System or cloud misconfigurations
• Weak or leaked user credentials
• Unencrypted data or information
• Outdated applications or software

If any of these vulnerabilities get exploited, it could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to customers’ sensitive data and jeopardize their confidentiality & integrity. 

What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management is a cybersecurity practice that helps organizations discover and categorize vulnerabilities and attack points in their network devices, systems, applications, and other assets.

By utilizing cybersecurity vulnerability management, organizations can rate each vulnerability in their network so that their IT and security teams can realize the severity of the issue.

Compared to ASM, vulnerability management mainly focuses on internal cyber assets that may pose a potential risk to an organization. It doesn’t take into account how each potential threat connects to the other assets or the rest of the organization’s network. 

In other words, cybersecurity vulnerability management neither communicates nor emphasizes the importance of solving an issue to the extent that attack surface management does.

What is Attack Surface?

The term “attack surface” refers to the collection of all potential attack entry points which could be easily exploited in case of a cyber attack.

The cyber security attack surface generally includes physical (hardware), digital (software), cloud-based, and internet-facing cyber assets in which sensitive data is usually either stored or processed.

Any organization’s attack surface can change dynamically depending on the addition of new cyber assets and the retirement of existing ones. 

This is why every organization must monitor fluctuations in their cyber security attack surface continuously to keep their sensitive data intact & protected and prevent cyber attacks.

What is Attack Surface Management?

Attack surface management (ASM) is a modern cybersecurity approach in which organizations leverage various cybersecurity tools for continuous cyber asset discovery, identification, inventory, classification, monitoring, evaluation, prioritization, and remediation of potential attack entry points and vulnerabilities across their IT infrastructure.

Attack surface management provides better visibility into an organization’s attack surface by not only focusing on internal & external assets but understanding the relationships between them (i.e. how they are connected to each other), and their potential effect on the network in case of a cyber attack.

In short, the Attack Surface Management solution may provide information about cyber assets in your organization’s IT infrastructure. But if you want complete information about every cyber asset, you can only obtain them using a CAASM solution. This is because a CAASM solution can not only take inventory of all cyber assets but can also identify vulnerabilities & misconfigurations in all cyber assets.

Key Differences Between Vulnerability Management & ASM

Now that we have specified what vulnerability & attack surface management means, let’s explore the key differences between the two cybersecurity approaches.

Security Scope

The first key difference between vulnerability management and ASM is the scope of what these two approaches cover in the matter of cybersecurity risks.

For example, let’s assume that you’ve discovered a vulnerability in an exposed web application in your organization’s network. Now, the scope of enterprise vulnerability management covers everything from discovering such types of vulnerabilities to remediating them.

But ASM provides a more holistic view of things to your IT and cybersecurity teams by going beyond basic weaknesses to identify other possible attack vectors across the entire IT infrastructure, apps, devices, and data. 

Asset Discovery Approach

The asset discovery approach in vulnerability management and ASM are quite different from one another. In vulnerability management, asset discovery (often regarded as detection) happens by using vulnerability scanners to find known vulnerabilities and pen testing results for difficult vulnerabilities.

In ASM, organizations are required to use a specialized solution to discover and map all their digital assets that pose risks of unauthorized access & intrusion in their IT environment such as code repositories, software, web applications, IoT devices, and so on. 

Additionally, the attack surface discovery must be complete and account for all connections & relationships between different cyber assets.

This is better achieved through the attack surface management approach rather than vulnerability management.

Different Vulnerability Classification

Classifying vulnerabilities is an important stage in vulnerability management. It is equivalent to the classification stage in attack surface management. But compared to firmware vulnerability management, ASM goes more granular with its vulnerability classification process.

To elaborate, vulnerabilities in vulnerability management are generally classified according to types such as software, hardware, firmware, or root causes.

In ASM, the vulnerability classification process is done through a granular inventory that labels all cyber assets based on various different properties like owners, technical details, business importance, and compliance requirements. 

Continuous Security Monitoring

IT vulnerability management does not have a continuous attack surface security monitoring process. Organizations leveraging vulnerability management often manage vulnerabilities on an ad hoc basis at best.

This is even when the Center for Internet Security specifically recommends using continuous IT vulnerability management as a standard practice. 

Unlike vulnerability management, ASM has a built-in ability to continuously monitor an organization’s cyber assets for threats and vulnerabilities. 

This continuous monitoring approach is essential, especially given the dynamic nature of attack surfaces and the need for visibility across all cyber assets. 

Risk Scoring

In vulnerability management, the assessment stage usually involves prioritizing vulnerabilities for remediation based on their risks. 

Without prioritization, the IT & security teams end up spending their valuable time resolving vulnerabilities with low risk or stand a minimal chance of being exploited by hackers, while more critical vulnerabilities remain unfixed and pose a greater threat.

Attack surface management, on the other hand, has a risk-scoring step that considers the fluctuating risks posed by different cyber assets in an organization’s environment. 

For example, an organization might have thousands of cyber assets making up its attack surface. But irrespective of an organization’s resources, managing the attack surface must prioritize cyber assets based on the severity of risks they pose to the organization.

In simple words, ASM scores vulnerabilities based on their severity by following a standard called Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). The ASM factors CVSS into the risk scoring equation along with a few others such as asset discovery, the business purpose of each cyber asset, and the potential for damage in case the cyber asset gets compromised.

Vulnerability Management vs ASM — Which is Better?

Figuring out which approach is better between vulnerability management and attack surface management is not complicated. The answer lies in identifying what your organization needs. 

A good way to decide is by checking if your organization is subject to regulatory requirements. 

Sometimes, utilizing both vulnerability management and ASM can be mandatory and even required by law.

This is because the main purpose of vulnerability management and ASM is to build a strong security posture that can manage as well as mitigate any kind of cybersecurity threats and risks. 

But when we compare both approaches, ASM provides greater attack surface coverage and gives a holistic view of the internet-facing cyber assets of an organization, which helps to build a comprehensive cyber risk management network.

Vulnerability management, on the other hand, is incapable of detecting third-party vulnerabilities. However, it does offer a laser-focused approach to detecting as well as resolving cybersecurity vulnerabilities. 

So while organizations can decide to use either one based on their individual cybersecurity requirements, it’s recommended to use both in unison to develop a truly robust & complete cybersecurity program. 

How can Scrut Automation Help with Attack Surface Management?

It’s critical to leave no stone unturned when it comes to protecting your organization & all its assets from cyber threats. 

Complete CAASM solutions like Scrut can help to detect vulnerabilities instantly that are affecting your organization & its vendors with real-time risk scoring to give complete visibility over cyber assets and the entire attack surface.

Scrut’s CAASM solution provides context to vulnerability findings so that your IT and security teams can quickly & easily assess the blast radius of compromise and examine the severity of an incident to create more accurate threat models to prevent similar incidents from occurring again.

Furthermore, as your IT infrastructure and business processes grow & evolve, Scrut will instantly identify and address all cybersecurity gaps.

FAQs