The Importance of Attack Surface Management in the 2022 Verizon DBIR

Editor’s Note: The following post is an excerpt. To read more, click here.

This year’s 15th installment of the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) features yet another impressive dataset of corporate breaches and exposures marked by an overriding postulate: attack surfaces matter and they should dictate a large portion of your risk assessment strategy.

As more businesses and state entities move their operations to the cloud, the ever-shifting attack surface is likely to become the next battlefront; a reverberating ground for unchecked vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, unintended asset exposures (e.g., cloud storage), and similar human-centric activity with the potential to quickly deteriorate any robust security posture.

The Impact of Cloud Misconfigurations

As we can see from the key findings from the 2022 DBIR, lack of visibility into public-facing assets is one of the most prominent problems inhibiting security teams from preventing threats to their organizations. And with misconfiguration errors on a steady rise since 2018, external attack surface management has never been more important. Despite concerted efforts by cloud providers to offer their consumers a mature shared responsibility model backed by suitable security controls, the truth is that unintended exposures, and even forgotten assets, are still the result of human error. According to the DBIR, up to 13% of breaches are caused by some sort of error or misconfiguration event, with misconfigured cloud storage instances leading the trend. And when paired with the lack of proper tracking and inventory capabilities, misconfigurations are largely driving risk in all verticals.

Attack Surface Intelligence Prevents DBIR’s Most Popular Threats

With a unified view of its external infrastructure, an organization can better navigate across disparate technology systems and quickly map and resolve vulnerabilities while keeping pace with its dynamic attack surface. It can also arm the organization with insights toward making better-informed decisions regarding digital transformation efforts.

Attack Surface Intelligence from Recorded Future shines a light on an organization’s risks tied to their connected environments by detecting potential threats, such as any kind of server and app misconfigurations, and providing a comprehensive toolset to understand and mitigate those risks across the entire attack surface.

Attack Surface Intelligence provides an easy way for teams to generate a complete and dynamic inventory of all their digital assets, as well as identify CVEs and critical misconfigurations over all their hosts. Through Attack Surface Intelligence, teams access all the data related to their organization’s apex domain, subdomains, and associated domains through an easy-to-use interface, while keeping an eye on all the new digital assets added day by day. Plus, Attack Surface Intelligence risk rules provide detailed evidence for more than 200 misconfigurations, fundamentally changing the way common vulnerabilities are curated and presented, and providing an unmatched view of the changing attack surface of an organization.

To learn more, or gain real-time visibility into your organization’s IT assets and cloud environment, request a demo of Attack Surface Intelligence today.

Editor’s Note: This post is an excerpt. To read more, click here.