Getting Ahead of Continuous Threat Exposure Management with CAASM

NetSPI’s Tom Parker offers insight on getting ahead of continuous threat exposure management with CAASM. This article originally appeared on Solutions Review’s Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community enabling the human conversation on AI.

For security teams, gaining comprehensive visibility into a company’s attack surface is becoming an increasingly daunting, but mission-critical task. Further, this capability is one of the cornerstones of a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) program, as defined by Gartner. The sheer number of systems in use today—from legacy internal infrastructure to cloud-based applications, and the proliferation of personal devices through bring-your-own-device (BYoD) policies—has expanded the scope and complexity of many of the common exposures that our teams have been accustomed to addressing over the past decade. This modern attack surface is highly dynamic and constantly shifting, making it difficult for security teams to maintain the necessary oversight.

Further contributing to this challenge is the fact that many security teams operate with a false sense of security, believing that the visibility and exposure management challenge has been solved, by leveraging non-CAASM products that provide an incomplete view into their assets. Without a more transparent and comprehensive approach, organizations risk leaving critical exposures in their attack surface, highlighting the urgent need for them to leverage effective cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM).

Defining CAASM

Cyber asset attack surface management, or CAASM, is an increasingly critical cyber security category (coined by Gartner in its Hype Cycle) designed to provide comprehensive visibility into an organization’s entire digital asset inventory. It helps identify, map, and aid in the exposure management of cyber assets—ranging from devices, cloud services, applications, and software—to map an organization’s attack surface, improve security posture, and eliminate risks. Well-architected CAASM solutions unlock the power of existing enterprise data from disparate systems (such as EDR, Firewalls, or Identity and Access management systems) to give security and IT teams a unified, accurate view of their assets, enabling better risk management and remediation.

CAASM can offer security and IT teams an inside-out, outside-in perspective of all assets within their IT estate. CAASM goes a step further by allowing security operators to understand how these assets are related to one another (such as a user account’s relation to systems that the account has been observed logging into) while highlighting potential exposures. When combined with external attack surface and cloud data, this approach provides a holistic view of an organization’s entire technology estate. Potential exposures might stem from common vulnerabilities (CVEs), security product misconfigurations, or missing security controls. By replacing manual, error-prone data collection processes, security teams can gain insight into real-time attack surface visibility, enhancing both accuracy and efficiency. CAASM’s real-time tracking also supports regulatory compliance, giving organizations access to the necessary insights and documentation required to meet regulatory standards and reduce the risk of fines during audits.

At a time when threats to cybersecurity are becoming even more unpredictable and sophisticated, having this degree of visibility over your organization’s operations and the potential vulnerabilities it will face is essential.

CAASM’s Key Differentiators

As malicious attackers and attack vectors become more sophisticated amid new technology developments, an organization’s approach to cybersecurity also needs to. Traditional methods of monitoring and securing organizations’ assets are no longer sufficient; manual processes often lead to incomplete data, errors, and delayed responses to threats. With CAASM, teams have access to fundamental capabilities that should exist in any modern security program — and differentiates itself from other cybersecurity approaches because it provides visibility across the entire ecosystem, including internal assets, cloud services, and non-traditional IT assets like operational technology (OT) devices. Approaches like Zero Trust, endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR), and even traditional attack surface management (ASM) leave gaps, due to their access to narrowly scoped data sets.

CAASM in Action

By leveraging CAASM’s capabilities, organizations can gain greater control over their cyber assets and enhance their overall security posture. Here are some examples of use cases where CAASM can make a significant impact on your organization’s approach to cybersecurity:

• Identifying Shadow IT: CAASM can help security teams identify Shadow IT in traditional environments and in the cloud by pulling asset data from cloud service providers and correlating it with internal inventories such as legacy CMDB products and other data sources. This allows organizations to discover untracked and possibly insecure assets, enabling effective posture management.
• Merging Disparate Data Sources: Many organizations have fragments of asset data spread across different tools (e.g. CMDBs, endpoint management systems). CAASM aggregates and normalizes this data, eliminating discrepancies and blind spots. Centralizing asset data can improve the accuracy of an organization’s inventories, streamline its security workflows, and help security teams make more informed decisions on how to protect critical assets.

• Automated Vulnerability Prioritization: By continuously monitoring asset inventory and correlating it with vulnerability data, CAASM can help organizations prioritize critical vulnerabilities based on asset exposure and business impact. This enables security teams to focus their remediation efforts on the most pressing threats, reducing the overall risk to the organization and optimizing the use of resources for patching and mitigation.

Implementing CAASM at Your Organization

For teams that are just starting their CAASM journeys or looking to implement it effectively, careful planning and execution are key. A well-thought-out approach can help ensure successful integration and maximize the value CAASM brings to your security operations. Here are some tips to help guide your implementation process:

• Start with Asset Discovery: The first step to CAASM is to ensure that your organization has a comprehensive, accurate inventory of all cyber assets. Begin by consolidating data from existing tools, systems, and cloud services to create a complete picture of your asset landscape.
• Integrate CAASM with Existing Tools: Maximize the value of CAASM by integrating it with existing security tools such as vulnerability scanners, EDR/XDR, and configuration management databases (CMDBs). This helps ensure real-time updates and a unified view.
• Set Clear Goals and Metrics: Define what success looks like for your CAASM implementation. Set measurable goals such as reducing mean time to identify vulnerabilities or improving the accuracy of your asset inventory over time.

The rapid adoption of new technologies and applications has created new blind spots and difficult-to-track vulnerabilities. In this era of increasing complexity, CAASM ensures that organizations can effectively stay ahead of evolving risks by offering a more efficient, proactive approach to security management that maximizes the value of existing data and improves the ability to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities across an organization’s complete digital ecosystem.