Today, each endpoint, user, and system within an organization is a potential point of entry for cybercriminals. In times when remote work or cloud dependency is on the rise, the access points that could leave organizations vulnerable are also growing at a rapid pace. An organization’s attack surface comprises all the vulnerabilities, endpoints, and points of access an attacker might potentially leverage. Recent research revealed that 64 percent of CISOs now feel their organizations are more vulnerable to cyberattacks as a result of this extended attack surface. The digital environment is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and there is an increasing need to understand and manage risks so that security can be maintained and critical assets protected. This further highlights why companies should address security risks immediately, protect valuable assets, and reduce exposure to threats using attack surface monitoring.
This article provides an in-depth overview of attack surface monitoring, its definition, the difference between attack surface management and attack surface monitoring, the essential components of attack surface monitoring, and some practical steps to implement it. You will also find benefits, common challenges, and some real-world applications. By the end, you’ll be able to improve your cybersecurity posture and develop a monitoring strategy that effectively reduces potential risks.
What is Attack Surface Monitoring?
Attack surface monitoring includes continuous detection, discovery, and investigation of all digital assets, endpoints, and entry points that may be leveraged during an attack. An attack surface today extends from devices to software to cloud services, which necessitates a holistic approach such as ASM. A recent report has stated that as many as 73 percent of IT leaders expressed concern over the size of their attack surfaces. This suggests that most organizations are finding it very difficult to effectively manage their digital exposures in the dynamically changing threat landscape. In essence, an attack surface monitoring system can keep an organization informed in real time about emergent vulnerabilities to take instantaneous measures and minimize security risks.
Why is Continuous Attack Surface Monitoring Important?
Over the past couple of years, shadow IT, configuration errors, and unnoticed internet exposures have been determined to be the root cause of 38% of effective attacks. This statistic underscores the importance of continuous monitoring to identify these vulnerabilities before they are exploited. With constantly evolving cyber threats, continuous attack surface monitoring provides ongoing visibility to prevent gaps in defenses.
Below, we delve into why continuous monitoring is essential for maintaining a proactive cybersecurity posture:
- Rapid Detection of Vulnerability: Continuous monitoring allows an organization to quickly identify and patch the vulnerabilities before the attackers can attempt to use them. The sooner detection means that the weaknesses have been patched in order to help protect the overall system. Due to such potential vulnerabilities, therefore, an organization is capable of minimizing such exposure times, hence reducing the risk of an attack.
- Keeping the Pacing with Growing Assets: With the increase in remote work and IoT, digital assets are on the rise. Continuous monitoring will enable one to keep track of all the digital assets and not miss the vulnerabilities that have gone unchecked. This will ensure that all new devices, applications, and services added will be included in the monitoring process so no potential attack vector is left unmonitored.
- Mitigate Advanced Persistent Threats: Advanced persistent threats are sophisticated, and the threat may continue for a long period in systems. Continuous monitoring ascertains the chance of early-stage detection of these concealed attacks, thereby reducing the chances of them ever taking hold. By watching out for suspicious activities, an organization will neutralize APTs before they cause serious damage or data breaches.
- Complying with Regulatory Requirements: Unfortunately, most regulatory standards, such as GDPR and CCPA, have made it incumbent on organizations to institute regular monitoring of vulnerabilities. Attack surface monitoring in cyber security ensures that compliance requirements are met, hence avoiding penalties. It also serves to help demonstrate that robust cybersecurity measures are in place for regulators and stakeholders, a factor so critical to business credibility.
- An Unplanned Risk Of Shadow IT: Shadow IT is the devices or applications used without authority. Attack surface monitoring detects unauthorized assets, reducing risks of unapproved technologies and enabling the whole IT environment to be visible and certain. Without continuous monitoring, shadow IT can easily remain concealed while opening your organization to a host of cyber threats.
Attack Surface Monitoring vs. Attack Surface Management
While attack surface monitoring and attack surface management both involve the identification of vulnerabilities to mitigate them, what makes them different are their focus and methodology. This understanding helps organizations differentiate which approach to choose based on their needs. Let’s begin with a comparison table followed by a brief discussion of the differences:
Dimension | Attack Surface Monitoring | Attack Surface Management |
Focus | Provides continuous visibility into vulnerabilities. | Focuses on prioritizing and mitigating identified vulnerabilities. |
Frequency | Operates on an ongoing, real-time basis. | Follows a scheduled, staged approach with periodic reviews. |
Data Analysis | Emphasizes collection and detection of vulnerability data. | Transforms data into actionable steps for risk reduction. |
Toolset and Automation | Uses real-time analytics tools for monitoring. | Relies on decision-support and prioritization tools. |
Integration | Integrates with security operations for immediate threat detection. | Coordinates with risk management for systematic remediation efforts. |
Risk Prioritization | Identifies all vulnerabilities without prioritizing. | Ranks vulnerabilities based on risk level to focus on critical issues. |
Response Speed | Enables rapid alerts and response to new threats. | Focuses on planned responses and strategic long-term risk reduction. |
The table highlights the contrasting roles of attack surface monitoring tools and attack surface management across essential dimensions. The attack surface monitoring framework delivers continuous, real-time visibility into vulnerabilities, with a focus on immediate detection to aid security teams in responding swiftly to threats. Closely integrated with security operations, attack surface monitoring in cyber security emphasizes data collection and rapid action, helping to prevent threats before they escalate. On the other hand, an attack surface management prioritizes vulnerabilities and takes proactive steps towards systematic risk reduction.
In terms of automation and tools, attack surface monitoring relies on real-time analytics for constant tracking, enabling fast responses to new vulnerabilities as they arise. In general, attack surface management provides decision-support utilities that prioritize risks based on the impact they have, allowing remediation to preserve alignment with greater security objectives. Compared to attack surface monitoring tools, whose operations focus on immediate threat identification without prioritization, attack surface management emphasizes the approach toward long-term consistency by addressing high-risk issues first. These approaches complement a cybersecurity strategy that combines real-time monitoring and risk reduction, prioritized in a resilient security posture.
Core Components of Attack Surface Monitoring
Attack surface monitoring involves several key components that converge to provide a holistic view of the digital footprint of an organization. It identifies, tracks, and analyzes possible vulnerabilities through these activities, which ensures that no aspect of the digital environment goes unchecked by covering all entry points.
Here, we present each of the components in depth:
- Asset Discovery: Identifying every connected device, server, and various third-party integrations is very critical, with a view to ensuring complete visibility. An exhaustive inventory will minimize blind spots that may serve as potential attack vectors. Asset discovery forms the foundation of monitoring since it gives an organization the ability to understand what it needs to protect.
- Vulnerability Scanning and Risk Analysis: Once the resources or assets have been identified, they must be analyzed for vulnerabilities. The risk analysis helps in prioritization and focusing on high-risk areas that can be potentially leveraged. This enables organizations to focus their resources where they are most needed to mitigate the most serious threats.
- Continuous Monitoring: During the period 2021 and 2022, undiscovered or poorly managed internet-facing assets contributed to 69 percent of the data compromises that occurred. This is the very reason why the employment of technologies for tracking changes in the attack surface continuously is very important as it will ensure the timely identification of new risks. Overall, it’s an ongoing process that maintains visibility of new and evolving threats.
- Threat Intelligence Integration: Real-time threat intelligence enables matching newly discovered vulnerabilities against the current threat landscape. This proactive approach shall assist in predicting and preventing potential attacks based on the latest threat information. Threat intelligence provides context critical to understanding the severity and relevance of identified risks.
- Alerting and Reporting: Alert notifications are important in ensuring security teams are aware on time, particularly on critical vulnerabilities. The detailed report provided by ASM shall help the stakeholders to understand the status of security to make informed decisions. Alerts should be prioritized to ensure that critical issues pop up for immediate attention with minimum alert fatigue.
- Integration with Incident Response: Attack surface monitoring should be integrated into incident response protocols so that teams can take the right action upon detection. A well-integrated system ensures that, from the alerts and reports, subsequent action can be taken for quick remediation to minimize potential damage.
Types of Attack Surface Monitoring
There are several types of attack surface monitoring, each of which represents unique areas of an organization’s digital infrastructure. In the section below, you will find how each type covers different vulnerabilities, which are either internal or external to the organization.
- Internal Attack Surface Monitoring: This deals with the assets that are on the internal network of an organization, including devices, applications, and internal databases. This type identifies risks that originate from inside the corporate network, thus ensuring that internal assets are secured. It is essential in defending against insider threats and misconfigurations.
- External Attack Surface Monitoring: External attack surface monitoring refers to the scanning of assets facing the public, such as websites, servers, and cloud services. Normally, such areas are the first point of attack, and therefore, they ought to be well monitored for possible weak points that an outsider could exploit. External motoring of the attack surface ensures that externally visible weaknesses are remediated on time.
- Dynamic Application Monitoring: Dynamic application monitoring involves checking the running condition of applications to identify potentially exploited vulnerabilities that arise from insecure coding practices. This will ensure that applications are resilient, even if static code scanning misses these issues. This monitoring is most critical for applications that are regularly updated or modified.
- Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring: As cloud services are increasingly involved in the operational activities of the business, monitoring the configurations, access points, and usage is critical for securing the cloud infrastructure against possible risks. Cloud monitoring ensures that the data stored and processed within cloud environments is safe and as per the requirements.
- Third-Party Attack Surface Monitoring: Vendors, third-party partners, and third-party services are also integrated into systems. Such third parties expose significant attack vectors if secured and monitored inadequately. Minimizing the level of risk coming from externality-based partnerships is an objective of third-party access monitoring.
- IoT Device Monitoring: This monitors and tracks Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which are increasingly deployed within the corporate environment by default, usually lack strong security capabilities and, therefore, pose a weak endpoint. In fact, IoT monitoring can prevent devices from potentially becoming a weak point for the organization’s security.
How Does Attack Surface Monitoring Work?
Understanding how attack surface monitoring works empowers organizations to implement the practice seamlessly into their security framework. The process entails certain steps that are designed to find out, assess, and deal with possible vulnerabilities.
Each of the steps is described here in detail:
- Asset Identification and Inventory: This involves creating an inventory of all such physical and digital assets, devices, servers, databases, or any cloud service that can be used as entry points for an attack. Proper identification definitely guarantees extensive monitoring.
- Data Ingestion: IT telemetry and logs from disparate sources can be aggregated to form a complete view of the attack surface. This view allows for the detection of noteworthy assets and monitoring activity on and over the network. Collected data forms the basis of threat detection and analysis.
- Vulnerability Assessment: Conduct regular scanning of the identified assets to detect security weaknesses or configuration errors that a hacker could exploit. Vulnerability assessments are crucial in maintaining the proactive security posture of the implementation. Regular assessments provide for the detection of risks that might remain latent otherwise.
- Real-time Analytics: Leverage analytics in order to monitor the data emanating from the assets for unusual behaviors, anomalies, or other kinds of signs of compromise. This lays the bedrock for proactive threat detection. In this manner, real-time analytics helps in mitigating threats before actual damage is caused.
- Prioritization Based on Risk: Categorize the vulnerabilities into groups based on their criticality so as to provide security teams with capabilities that involve prioritizing remediation work. It allows for the fixing of critical vulnerabilities first in order to reduce the possibility of a major incident. By prioritizing risk it ensures the right utilization of resources towards the biggest threats.
- Automation of Response and Updates: Automatic response to threats, when possible, reduces the response time. Update the attack surface database for any change in the environment so that the monitoring system is always up to date. Automation reduces manual workload and delays in responses, thereby making the security measures effective.
How to Build a Robust Attack Surface Monitoring Strategy?
An attack surface monitoring strategy actually demands a delicate combination of planning, specialized tools, and continuous processes in balance with each other to ensure that the rightly identified vulnerabilities are continuously managed.
In this section, we outline the essential steps to get you started.
- Identify the Attack Surface Scope: Identify the extent of assets to monitor, such as cloud environments, on-premise infrastructures, and third-party systems. Well-defined scoping assures wide coverage. A clear scope is the bedrock upon which effective focusing of monitoring efforts is premised.
- Deploy Attack Surface Monitoring Tools: Specialized attack surface monitoring tools provide visibility into the whole digital footprint while automating vulnerability identification and analysis. The right tools make detection easier in real time, preventing breaches.
- Integrate with Existing Security Frameworks: Connect attack surface monitoring initiatives to larger security frameworks like Attack Surface Management, SIEM systems, and incident response tools in order to drive holistic approaches. This also ensures integration is established, making monitoring an intrinsic part of the entire cybersecurity stance.
- Threat Intelligence Integration: Enhance the monitoring activities with the integration of current threat intelligence to stay ahead of the emerging threat. The proactive element employed in this kind of monitoring effort enhances the contextual element, which is key to the presupposition and prevention of attacks. In any case, threat intelligence provides depth in monitoring activities, thus better preparedness.
- Schedule Routine Reviews: The aim of this is to periodically review monitoring strategies to reflect the changes in infrastructure, the introduction of new technologies, or cyber threats. This will help keep the monitoring strategies relevant to organizational needs by being regularly updated.
- Employee Training on Cyber Hygiene: Training personnel on the best practices of cyber hygiene that can prevent actions expanding the attack surface, such as installing unauthorized software. Training employees is one of the critical steps in minimizing human threat vectors and reducing vulnerability.
7 Key Benefits from Attack Surface Monitoring Solutions
The integration of attack surface monitoring solutions comes with quite a number of benefits that significantly enhance an organization’s cybersecurity posture. These solutions give organizations the potential to find and mitigate risks before they can be exploited.
In this section, we have included some of the major benefits of integrating such solutions.
- Proactive Vulnerability Management: With attack surface monitoring, vulnerabilities are detected long before they are exploited. This form of management, therefore, offers proactive risk management. Early detection allows security teams to fix weaknesses before they may be used as entry points by attackers, thus reducing the chances of successful attacks.
- Improved Threat Visibility: With complete visibility into the organization’s assets, potential threats become easier to identify. With continuous views, security teams can now respond with speed and more effectiveness, reducing potential damages. Such improved visibility ensures that no part of the network remains unobserved and unchecked.
- Reduced Attack Surface Complexity: Continuous monitoring helps identify and harden or eliminate unnecessary or vulnerable assets. This reduces the overall complexity of the attack surface. The simplification of the attack surface enables organizations to concentrate more on the protection of critical systems. The simpler the attack surface, the easier it is to defend.
- Improved Incident Response Times: Improved visibility into the assets and vulnerabilities enables security teams to detect incidents well in advance, thus responding quicker. Faster response times contain threats and reduce the impact of any security breaches. Quick responses minimize the damage caused by successful attacks.
- Regulatory Compliance Support: Attack surface monitoring supports an organization in reaching the continuous monitoring regulatory demands concerning vulnerability assessments. Compliance is achieved more easily because of automatic checks and great reporting capabilities. Meeting regulatory standards will keep an organization out of fines, increasing trust among other stakeholders.
- Protection against Evolving Threats: Continuous monitoring automatically adjusts to new threats in real time, hence providing a protection mechanism that evolves with the latest attack techniques. Such a dynamic approach means an organization is further ahead in facing the latest cyber threats. Evolving defenses grant the ability to always remain one step ahead of attackers.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: The attack surface monitoring solutions will make data insights available to security teams for proper decision-making. Data-based approaches will further help in prioritizing vulnerabilities needing immediate attention based on risk exposure. Such decisions make security efficient, further highlighting the benefit of ASM solutions for companies.
Common Challenges in Attack Surface Monitoring
While attack surface monitoring is important, it also brings along some challenges that have to be dealt with by the organization in order to be effective. These include affecting visibility, resources, and even security.
The following is a discussion of the common challenges and strategies for overcoming them.
- Asset Sprawl and Shadow IT: Asset tracking becomes difficult to handle in this modern environment where remote working and unauthorized tools are introduced in a network. Regular auditing and automated asset discoveries will help in building much-needed visibility as part of keeping these issues at bay. Accurate asset management is needed to have effective monitoring.
- Integration Complexity: Integrating monitoring tools into systems that already exist can be complex in nature, mainly dealing with legacy infrastructure systems. Tools chosen will need to support integrations for APIs and community plugins to lighten some of these issues and allow for easier maintenance of a unified monitoring solution. It will ensure our systems work flawlessly with each other.
- False Positives Overload: Multiple alerts can lead to alert fatigue, which is a situation in which security teams may miss important alerts. Risk-based prioritization in alerts and filtering non-critical warnings will keep the system free of alert fatigue and allow it to show focused attention where necessary. Prioritizing alerts ensures that critical threats are addressed promptly.
- Limited Visibility of Cloud Environments: One issue in monitoring cloud environments is the limited visibility of cloud environments. Since cloud infrastructures cannot be intrinsically controlled directly, it is harder to monitor. Specialized monitoring tools for the cloud will give better visibility and control, thus allowing an in-depth assessment of cloud assets.
- Resource Allocation Problems: Smaller security teams cannot control the scope appropriately as they lack a sufficient number of skillful people in them. Processes must be automated, and supportive resources must be procured using tools that automate efforts by eliminating manual activities. Automation can help businesses that do not have substantial resources.
- Cost of Effective Tools: Effective monitoring of the attack surface tends to be expensive, especially for SMEs. Concentration on the most valuable assets and using open-source solutions when necessary will help to cut down on some unnecessary costs without giving up security. SMEs should consider some affordable solutions available in the market to keep themselves adequately protected.
Best Practices for Effective Attack Surface Monitoring
The effectiveness of attack surface monitoring can be maximized by proven strategies that drive better visibility, precise detection, and support multimodal quick response. These attack surface monitoring best practices will allow organizations to coordinate with security operations and ensure that every layer is guarded.
In this section, we’ll explore essential methods for achieving robust and reliable attack surface monitoring.
- Increase Automation: The attack surface keeps on changing very fast, hence the need for automation in asset discovery and vulnerability analysis. For example, 43% of organizations reportedly spend more than 80 hours on manual attack surface discovery, hence the need for automation to bring efficiency. Automation saves time and enhances accuracy.
- Use Risk-Based Prioritization: Assess the potential impact and likelihood of exploitation by prioritizing the most critical vulnerabilities first. A risk-based approach ensures that security teams deal with the most serious threats in a timely manner, minimizing potential damages by dealing with high-risk vulnerabilities first.
- Perform Regular External Testing: Periodic external penetration testing from an outsider’s point of view might reveal vulnerabilities that internal monitoring would not catch. Outsider testing gives a different perspective on potential weaknesses in the system and ensures nothing is left unturned. Regular testing is an essential part of a comprehensive security strategy.
- Leverage Threat Intelligence: Use threat intelligence to predict and expect emerging threats. This is an insight that improves the monitoring protocols and accelerates the adaptation of the organization to new risks that further strengthen the defense. It keeps the monitoring approach dynamic and informed.
- Ensure Endpoint Visibility: Maintain visibility over all endpoints, including remote workstations and mobile devices. Endpoint visibility is critical because it helps eliminate blind spots that attackers could exploit for entry into the network. Broad endpoint monitoring reduces potential vulnerability.
- Continuous Improvement of Policies: Update security policies and associated monitoring protocols to reflect this shifting threat landscape. Proper security monitoring processes should never lag behind the latest advance of the threat landscape from attacking the system. Changes and updates ensure that policies hold well in countering more newly emerging threats.
Real-World Examples of Attack Surface Monitoring: Case Studies
Advanced attack surface monitoring solutions are being adopted by organizations of all verticals each year to protect their sensitive data and infrastructure. SentinelOne’s next-generation endpoint protection has been instrumental for several global enterprises so far, showing the transformative impact one can have with comprehensive, autonomous security across diverse environments.
Here is how SentinelOne’s solution enhanced attack surface monitoring for notable companies:
- O’Neill Secures Global IT Environment with SentinelOne’s Unified Monitoring: SentinelOne Endpoint security unified the monitoring at the European headquarters and global locations of O’Neill, which is a heritage surf wear brand. O’Neill had a heterogeneous IT setup that included remote servers and endpoints, making the management of security seamless in nature. The SentinelOne’s Singularity™ platform provided them with a single console that had complete visibility across all endpoints, immediately detecting threats previously missed. The ability to monitor in real time enabled O’Neill to neutralize the risk fast, substantially strengthening its global cybersecurity posture without impacting system performance.
- Noris Network AG Strengthens Protection against Advanced Cyber Threats: Germany-based ICT provider Noris Network AG saw a growing number of endpoint attacks and needed a solution that was on par with the higher demands. The SentinelOne platform offered real-time behavioral analysis and AI-powered machine learning to let Noris network spot and react to advanced threats, including stealthy malware. Safe data handling was ensured with the framework according to GDPR. Low CPU consumption by SentinelOne, combined with the efficient detection rate, further allowed Noris Network to sustain operational continuity. This is a perfect example of how comprehensive attack surface monitoring can become extremely effective at mitigating modern cyber risks.
- Terres du Sud Streamlines Endpoint Protection with Autonomous Security: French agricultural firm Terres du Sud updated its security stance by deploying the autonomous endpoint protection developed by SentinelOne, reducing management complexity and improving ransomware defense. Until now, Terres du Sud had to operate several different systems to protect its environment. The responsible IT team suffered from performance slowdowns of the team and the need to manage systems from multiple consoles. SentinelOne’s single-agent architecture consolidated control of endpoints and servers alike. That allowed threat detection in real-time without impacting endpoint performance. Further, this monitoring enabled the team to stay ahead of crypto locker and file-less attacks. In that respect, the value of integrated, proactive attack surface monitoring was proven within the geographically dispersed organization.
- Cengage Boosts Cloud Security for AWS with SentinelOne: Global EdTech company Cengage chose SentinelOne’s Singularity™ platform to secure its AWS environment from rapidly evolving cyber threats. Its legacy antivirus solution was insufficient for the varied cloud and on-premise workloads supporting more than 5,500 employees globally. SentinelOne’s real-time AI-powered response unified security across Cengage’s hybrid cloud footprint while automating threat detection and simplifying incident response for AWS EC2, EKS, and ECS resources. With the attack surface monitoring native to the platform, the security team at Cengage was able to take swift action and reduce risk, ensuring continued uninterrupted access to their educational services around the globe.
Attack Surface Monitoring with SentinelOne
SentinelOne Singularity™ Platform protects attack surfaces with industry-leading AI threat detection and autonomous responses. It maximizes visibility across the entire enterprise and defends with unrivaled speed, coverage, and efficiency. Singularity for Identity can protect identity-based surfaces like Active Directory and Azure AD. Singularity for Cloud simplifies container and VM security no matter the location. It ensures maximum agility, and security, and ensures compliance.
SentinelOne Singularity™ Endpoint enables dynamic device discovery and protects unmanaged, network-connected endpoints that are known to introduce new risks. It can remediate and roll back endpoints with a single click, reducing mean time to respond and accelerating investigation. It also reduces false positives and increases detection efficacy consistently across OSes with an autonomous, combined EPP+EDR solution.
Singularity™ Ranger is a real-time network attack surface control solution that finds and fingerprints all IP-enabled devices on your network. Understand the risks they pose and automatically extend protections. Zero additional agents, hardware, or network changes are required. SentinelOne’s patented Storyline™ technology monitors, tracks, and contextualizes all event data from endpoints (and beyond) to reconstruct attacks in real-time, correlate related events without alert fatigue, and provide actionable insights to analysts of every experience level.
Singularity™ RemoteOps enables you to respond and investigate with true enterprise speed and scale. Remotely collect and analyze forensics and perform remediation on thousands of endpoints across the organization simultaneously so you can easily manage your entire fleet.
Conclusion
In summary, attack surface monitoring is the key to identifying and managing security risks in today’s expanding digital landscape. Attack surface monitoring allows organizations to continuously outpace threat discovery that may put their cybersecurity posture at risk by providing visibility continuously and asset management effectively. With proactive monitoring techniques, businesses can mitigate risks and safeguard sensitive data or critical assets.
Businesses that are looking to improve their cybersecurity should embrace attack surface monitoring with proactive defense measures. Solutions like the SentinelOne Singularity™ platform provide holistic attack surface management and monitoring, which offers real-time visibility, efficient threat response, and easy integration for a secure digital environment. To learn more, check out SentinelOne’s offerings and request a personalized demo to understand how we can improve your cybersecurity strategy.
FAQs
1. What is ASM?
ASM stands for Attack Surface Monitoring. It identifies, detects, and scans for threats and vulnerabilities across all endpoints, networks, cloud services, and systems. It scopes for potential threats across the entire cloud estate, focusing on lessening attack surfaces.
2. How Does SentinelOne’s ASM Work?
ASM powered by SentinelOne leverages advanced threat intelligence through endpoint protection, real-time vulnerability assessment, and automated threat response. This protects on-premises environments, hybrid clouds, networks, and mobile devices.
3. What are the Main Benefits of Attack Surface Monitoring?
ASM gives enriched threat visibility, provides proactive security, supports compliance, and optimizes security resources with automatic detection and response to threats.
4. How Does Vulnerability Management Differ from Attack Surface Monitoring?
Vulnerability management refers to the process of identifying and prioritizing weaknesses in an organization’s IT systems so that appropriate remediation work can be done to reduce associated risks. Attack surface monitoring refers to the process of identifying and classifying attack surface elements of an organization’s IT assets and prioritizing corresponding mitigation efforts for such risks.
Remediation to specific individual vulnerabilities is involved in vulnerability management. Attack Surface Monitoring is always monitoring as well as protecting every potential point of entry into the system across the entire IT landscape.
5. Can we counter or prevent zero-day attacks with Attack Surface Monitoring?
While no solution promises immunity against any given attack, ASM, together with other EDR solutions like SentinelOne, offers the best means of avoiding zero-day attacks through real-time monitoring and automated response capabilities.
6. How Often Should One Monitor Their Attack Surface?
Ideally, ASM should be an iterative and continuous process, because today’s modern IT environment is dynamic. Threats come into existence all the time, as you may realize from the demand for real-time threat detection solutions across industries.