5 Steps to Protect Your Enterprise’s Attack Surface

With the increases in cyber attacks and vulnerabilities detected every day, it's become even more challenging to stay on top of every aspect of your organization's security. Securing your organization is no longer as simple as it was in the past, thanks to the rise in various types of attacks, including targeted attacks towards employees in the form of phishing emails, DNS hijacking, and organizations prioritizing application availability and spreading servers, cloud deployments over various cloud providers. Also, tech stacks and software libraries used in your applications are growing larger with various dependencies, leading to further complexities with regard to an organization's overall security. How the attack surface grows with any organization With the advent of the global pandemic, remote working has become the go-to solution for organizations all over the world. This, in turn, has yielded consequences such as the rise in social engineering attacks, and other forms of targeted attacks. This is because each employee of an organization has become even more targetable while working in a non-maintained home networking environment. For example, if an employee works from home, the employee is often connected to the internet with an ISP-provided WiFi router and modem. These devices frequently run with firmware that is vulnerable or outdated, as they don't receive updates as often as enterprise-based networking gear. So if the same employee works from an office, where enterprise-grade firewalls and networking gear are used, a certain amount of risk is eliminated, risk that could originate from compromised networking gear. While VPNs provide a great amount of security for accessing a corporation's internal assets, there is always a risk of malware entering the employee's work devices through compromised networking gear at home, whenever the VPN connection is disconnected or disrupted. Looking beyond an organization's employees With increasing demands in the reliability and availability of an organization's products, today's organizations have been forced to spread assets over various cloud providers. In the past, a single cloud provider would most likely handle a complete application end-to-end, but spreading an application across multiple cloud vendors has caused a notable increase in the size of the attack surface, with each cloud provider handling ACLs differently, at times, even working with differences in UI or the way certain tasks are handled within a cloud provider. And with multiple cloud vendors, the number of attack vectors increases as well. One cloud vendor getting compromised can lead to the entire application getting compromised. Putting the size of an organization aside, the tech stacks and libraries it uses can also lead to security-based issues. While using popular software libraries is generally considered a good idea, a vulnerability among them can lead to much larger issues. Consider the recent impact of the vulnerability in the Log for J library, a simple yet widely used logging tool. This led to multiple compromises of web applications, all of which needed immediate patching as a large number of the organizations affected had these applications operating on the public internet. Simply put, your attack surface is as spread out as your organization is, and on all fronts. The more widespread your resources (such as employees, cloud servers, tech stack, libraries, etc.) are, the larger your attack surface grows. How can you safeguard your attack surface? To begin using SecurityTrails Attack Surface Reduction (ASR), head over to your account and click on "Access Surface Browser". Next, click on the "Projects" option in the navbar. Once there, click on "Create a New Project". Give your project a name and enter the domain name of your organization, then click on "Create Project". Now, let's take a look at five ways in which your organization can leverage the power of the SecurityTrails ASR tool: 1. Asset mapp...