Exposure management: How to get ahead of cyber risk

Tenable One is the only exposure management platform you’ll need for a single, unified view of your modern attack surface. With Tenable One, you’ll be empowered to anticipate the consequences of cyberattacks and proactively address and manage cyber risk for all of your assets, everywhere.

Threat actors are banking on the likelihood your organization hasn’t remediated common and known software vulnerabilities. They want to use those exposures to infiltrate your systems, often with malicious intent to infect your assets with ransomware.

Many ransomware infections originate from these vulnerabilities and somewhere security teams often overlook — your Active Directory (AD).

If attackers can successfully exploit just one security weakness in Active Directory, they can easily escalate privileges. And, if your organization has poor cyber hygiene, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll easily gain a foothold within your attack surface and spread ransomware.

So, what can you do? Explore this study from Tenable to learn more about:

• Most targeted attack vectors and exploits
• How to prioritize remediation to focus on vulnerabilities that pose the greatest threat to your organization
• How Tenable One can help you identify Active Directory (AD) vulnerabilities and other exposures.

Attackers don’t care about your business silos. In fact, they’re hoping you have disconnects between your IT and security teams. Siloed security is a natural evolution of rapid technological adoption, especially as your teams integrate more OT, IoT, and cloud assets into your workflows.

Alongside this growth, the industry is inundated with disparate vulnerability management tools, each designed to tackle just one specific part of your entire attack surface. Few operate as a comprehensive, all-in-one security solution. That leaves you with disparate data, incomplete visibility and blind spots attackers are eagerly hoping to find before you do.

Threat actors will seek out your security weaknesses and then use them to move laterally across your network, often undetected.

Read this white paper to learn more about how to unify security across your attack surface, including:

• Lessons learned from past breaches
• Common exposure management obstacles
• Five ways you can optimize your vulnerability prioritization strategies to prevent breaches.

Join Tenable Connect to engage with others who have similar interests in learning more about exposure management or how to mature existing risk-based vulnerability management programs to a more effective exposure management strategy.

While shifting to a risk-based approach can help your organizations mature your vulnerability management program, the real question today is — is that enough?

The answer is not likely.

Instead, an exposure management program can help you take your cybersecurity program from one that’s reactive and bogged down in incident response to one that’s proactive and gives your team comprehensive insight into your entire attack surface. This will help you keep up with the constantly changing threat landscape and what that means for your unique organizational needs.

Implement these five recommendations to better understand all of your exposures so you can proactively reduce cyber risk:

1. Assess your current assets, on-prem and in the cloud (IT, OT, IoT, web apps, etc.).

Ask: Do our technologies work together and give us comprehensive insight into all of our exposures? Or, are they still siloed?

2. Understand your attack surface visibility.

Ask: What can we see? What do we need to see?

3. Prioritize efforts.

Ask: What should we do first? How can our remediation strategies be more predictive? Are we using threat intelligence? Can we analyze all attack paths for our most critical assets?

4. Measure remediation processes.

Ask: How well are we fixing exposures we find now? What can we do to make this more effective? What do our efforts look like compared to industry peers?

5. Communicate and take action.

Ask: How secure are we? Can we communicate our security posture effectively to executives, key stakeholders, and others? How do we utilize data to make more effective business decisions?

Finding a trusted and effective cybersecurity solution has long been frustrating and time-consuming. And, oftentimes, even after you painstakingly evaluate and implement a solution, getting everyone to use it and realize full benefits can be even more challenging.

That’s because these solutions have traditionally been hard to use or they provide so much data your teams don’t know what to do with it all.

Selecting an exposure management solution and getting your team buy-in doesn’t have to be such a headache. Here are three key features to look for to simplify the process:

1. The solution makes it simple to see all of your assets, everywhere, in one platform.

Yes, both on-prem and in the cloud. The solution should be more than just a way to inventory your assets. An effective exposure management solution should also identify asset-related vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other security issues and enable continuous monitoring so you always know what you have and where you may have exposures.

Look for a solution that gives you a unified view of your entire modern attack surface so you can eliminate blind spots and know what you need to do to effectively manage cyber risk.

2. The solution helps you make sense of data, anticipate threats and prioritize remediation.

Look for an exposure management system that will help you use threat intelligence and other relevant data to anticipate consequences of a cyberattack — as it directly applies to your organization.

Look for a solution that identifies relationships across your attack surface between assets, exposures, privileges and threats, and that can help you prioritize risk management and remediation. Your solution should also be able to continuously identify attack paths that pose the greatest risk of exploitation, even as your attack surface rapidly changes and expands. These features will make it easier for your teams to proactively reduce risk with the least amount of effort to prevent attacks.

3. The solution should help you effectively communicate cyber risk so you can make more informed security and business decisions.

Look for an exposure management solution with a centralized and business-aligned view of your exposures, along with clear KPIs to measure progress over time.

The solution should also offer insight beyond a broad overview so you can drill down into specifics from an asset, department or operational level. Also, look for a solution with benchmarking capabilities so you can understand how well your program performs in relation to industry peers.

Exposure management is all about moving from reactive security to a more proactive strategy that decreases your exposures. By adopting an exposure management platform, your organization will be better prepared to anticipate likely attacks while proactive reducing risk.

Here are some benefits of exposure management strategy:

Tenable One combines risk-based vulnerability management, web app scanning, cloud security and identity security into a single exposure management platform. It gives you a unified view of your entire attack surface so you can proactively address and manage risk for all of your assets.

An adversary’s view of your attack surface

By thinking like an attacker, your security teams will be better poised to proactively secure your attack surface.

This on-demand webinar explores why comprehensive attack surface discovery is challenging for most security teams. Watch it now to learn more about:

• What your enterprise looks like from an attacker's perspective
• Lessons learned from three cyberattacks, including tactics and attack vectors
• How you can enhance your prioritization and remediation strategies with increased cross-team collaboration

The cybersecurity threat landscape: Where are you now?

Your modern attack surface is constantly evolving, which makes it challenging to reduce complexities to protect your business from potential cyber breaches.

This on-demand webinar explores ways you can stay ahead of attackers by first understanding your current security posture. Watch this webinar to learn more about:

• Attack surface visibility challenges
• How to protect your organization from cyber threats
• Exposure management benefits
• How to avoid pitfalls as you navigate evolving security strategies

When it comes to vulnerabilities, “critical” doesn’t always mean “critical...”

The more assets you have across your attack surface, the greater the chance you could overlook vulnerabilities. If you don’t know all the assets you have and their associated vulnerabilities, it rapidly decreases the effectiveness of your patch management processes.

This on-demand webinar explores how to decrease friction between your infosec and IT teams to enhance your cybersecurity posture. Watch this webinar to learn more about:

• What makes a critical vulnerability actually critical
• How common vulnerability scoring systems can impede effective patching
• Why you should close the communication gap between your security, IT and compliance teams
• How to streamline patching to optimize remediation

Many cybersecurity teams struggle with preventing cyberattacks. That’s because they’re often drowning under contextless vulnerability data and don’t have much-needed insight into their attack surface.

That means they often don’t know what needs their attention first or how to fix security issues that may have the greatest impact on their organization.

The most effective modern security teams must evolve from this reactive vulnerability management approach to a proactive exposure management strategy. That begins with breaking down the silos that have prevented security teams from getting the comprehensive attack surface insight they need to stay ahead of cyberattacks.