Keeping track of known vulnerabilities is an unending chore for cyber security teams. These flaws – or attack paths – create openings for attackers, often resulting in data breaches.
Attack Path Management proactively maps and graphically represents these paths and prioritizes them to prevent hackers from making lateral movements within an organization.
Visibility
Visiting your organization’s attack surface is crucial to achieving an effective security posture. Visibility enables teams to proactively identify and address vulnerabilities, reduce cyber risk, meet regulatory requirements, and prevent data breaches.
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Unfortunately, many organizations struggle with visibility. This can be due to a variety of factors, including:
Complex IT Environments: Modern enterprises often have complex and diverse IT environments with interconnected systems, cloud infrastructure, and third-party services. This can result in blind spots where important assets are overlooked or not adequately monitored.
Prioritization
Having the right resources to address vulnerabilities is critical. But with backlogs growing and threat actors evolving, achieving a state of zero inboxes is challenging for many security teams.
Vulnerability prioritization improves security through attack path management by enabling organizations to deploy scarce resources to remediate high-risk vulnerabilities efficiently. This helps protect an organization’s most sensitive data and critical systems from the most sophisticated attacks.
To prioritize vulnerabilities effectively, it is essential to understand the business context of each vulnerability. This includes the impact on key business objectives, regulatory compliance, and customer trust. It is also important to consider the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited in the wild. These factors and understanding your organization’s risk tolerance level help determine the urgency of addressing each vulnerability.
Speed
Attack Paths are a problem most security teams need to learn how to manage. This is because they need a way to measure the scale or impact of these threats and resulting risks.
The good news is, that’s changing. Advanced threat detection and attack path management technology allow organizations to transition attack paths from unknowns into known ones.
This is done by identifying and visualizing attackers’ paths to compromise servers, workstations, users, and other systems within your network. This enables security teams to remediate vulnerabilities in critical choke points before they become identity snowballs that enable an adversary to steal data and paralyze business operations. Moreover, this helps to eliminate the unknown unknowns, which are countless pathways that threat actors could use to exploit vulnerabilities and misconfigurations throughout your environment.
Automation
The security challenges faced by today’s IT systems are massive. Cybercriminals exploit multiple vulnerabilities, often over time and across networks, to breach systems. This creates a dynamic environment that requires a holistic approach to protection. This is where attack path management improves cybersecurity.
While conventional tools like IAM, vulnerability scanning, and patching are essential to an organization’s security posture, these techniques only uncover a fraction of the risks an attacker can leverage to breach systems and steal data. Attack path management reveals the other exploitable paths that exist, which can be used to penetrate and exploit critical platforms like Active Directory infrastructures.
Automation levels the playing field and enables faster prevention of cyber threats. Moreover, quality automated systems can reduce the workload on short-staffed teams, help them avoid burnout, and focus on more strategic workstreams.
Convenience
Over the past two decades, Vulnerability Management has become a critical component of security programs. However, relying on multiple risk points at a time doesn’t give teams enough insight into the attackers’ potential trajectories to key assets.
IT systems are complex and dynamic, as privileged users log on to different systems each day (leaving behind tokens and credentials that adversaries can abuse), new applications require newly granted permissions, and existing systems change their security group memberships for business needs. Each change can create an Attack Path, which remains unknown to defenders until the attackers exploit them.
Attack path analysis ensures choke points where attackers are most likely to strike are proactively monitored and protected. This can help organizations reduce the risk of a breach and improve the overall security of key assets. Read more exciting articles on Tech new master
