Exposure management in cybersecurity involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential vulnerabilities and threats to minimize the risk of cyberattacks on an organization’s assets. This includes managing common vulnerabilities (CVEs) and non-CVE exposures, such as misconfigurations, end-of-life systems, application security findings, weak and stolen credentials, control gaps, and user risks.
Let’s understand how exposure management is different from traditional vulnerability management.
Exposure Management vs. Vulnerability Management
Vulnerability management deals with software flaws and vulnerabilities (CVEs) with an emphasis on patching everything. In contrast, exposure management consolidates vulnerabilities and other findings from dozens of security tools and then remediates or mitigates these security issues based on the risk to the business.
In exposure management, risk management actions include applying security updates (patching) and extending to implementing and tuning security controls and changing system or app configuration settings. Our comparison article explains the specific differences between exposure and vulnerability management.
Why Is Exposure Management Important?
As the number of new vulnerabilities and security findings grows, the only way for IT to manage cyber risk is to find all the CVE and non-CVE exposures AND prioritize ruthlessly. It’s not feasible to remediate 100% of exposures, especially in business-critical systems where the business impact of downtime often outweighs the risk of a breach. This contrasts with traditional methods with a narrow focus on severity alone as a metric for prioritization.
The Four Components of Exposure Management
Exposure management follows a structured approach through four key phases: assessment, prioritization, validation, and mobilization.
Let’s discuss each of these components:
Exposure Assessment
The first step in exposure management is to assess your attack surface. This includes internal assets such as endpoints, on-premises servers, and networking equipment. It also includes external assets such as internet-accessible servers, services in AWS, Azure, & GCP cloud environments, users (employees and contractors), and digital services (social media accounts).
The assets, applications, users and associated exposures (vulnerabilities and other findings) are then deduplicated and normalized to provide an accurate representation of the attack surface.
Risk-Based Prioritization
After assessing exposures, the next step is prioritization.
The five core factors of risk-based prioritization include:
- Severity: Considers the impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
- Threat Levels: Determines the threat level based on several factors including known exploits in the wild, availability of exploit kits, and potential business impact.
- Exploitability: Measures how easily an attacker can exploit the exposure.
- Effectiveness of Security Controls: Examines the efficacy of existing security measures to protect against exposure.
- Business Impact: Includes the financial consequences for the organization, such as fines, penalties, reputational damage, and notification and legal costs.
Exposure Validation
The next step is to validate the identified exposures, which is the simulation of attacker techniques. Methods for validation such as breach and attack simulations, penetration testing, CIS style benchmarking provide insights into which exposures are likely to be exploited.
Some tools such as Balbix go one step further and map all exposures to tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) outlined in the MITRE ATT&CK Framework. Balbix also identifies which security controls are applicable on each vulnerable asset, and determines the effectiveness of the control against specific TTPs. The higher the effectiveness of the controls, the less likely an attack leveraging a specific vulnerability will be successful.
Exposure Mobilization
Exposure mobilization is the final phase of exposure management, where identified exposures and risks are remediated or mitigated. This involves routing the required remediation or mitigation task to the appropriate team with the necessary information and conveying the right level of urgency, enabling them to take action promptly.
Successful mobilization requires the establishment of clear protocols and a well-defined plan that outlines the necessary actions. Collaboration across various teams—IT, security, operations, and executive leadership—is critical to provide a unified and prompt response.
Key tasks include creating specific projects targeting the identified exposures. These projects are then broken up into tickets, which are assigned to designated owners responsible for their execution. Some remediations can be completed fully automatically without any human intervention.
To maintain transparency and accountability, security teams need to track these projects in an analytics dashboard, which should feature data visualization tools that provide a comprehensive overview of progress in addressing exposures. It also allows stakeholders to monitor each project’s status, identify potential delays or issues, and ensure that all actions align with the organization’s overall security strategy.
If risk response (remediation or mitigation) speed is not sufficient, exposure management analytics enable you to figure out the bottlenecks and take steps to resolve them.
The Benefits of Exposure Management
Exposure management offers significant advantages by enhancing visibility, reducing IT workload, and improving executive reporting. Implementing exposure management means that organizations better understand their cybersecurity attack surface, streamline remediation efforts with intelligent automation, and communicate risks more effectively to key stakeholders.
Broader Coverage for Enhanced Visibility
Exposure management provides comprehensive coverage that leads to better visibility across your environment. Integrating data from various tools beyond traditional vulnerability management systems helps eliminate blind spots. Exposure management ensures a clearer and more complete view of your cyber risk, allowing for more complete risk assessments and better decisions.
Reduced IT Workload and More Mitigation Options
Traditional vulnerability prioritization methods often result in 2x-3x more workload for IT teams, with frequent patch cycles and extensive manual efforts. Exposure management significantly reduces this workload. Prioritizing exposures based on severity, threat levels, exploitability, the effectiveness of controls, and asset criticality enables IT teams to hone in on and remediate the subset of exposures that matter from a risk perspective.
We also get the option to remediate (e.g., patch) or mitigate the exposure. This is very important to address scenarios where remediation is not an option, e.g., when a patch is not available, or the system cannot be taken offline for a software update due to business requirements.
Exposure management recommends prioritized and focused actions and efficiently mobilizes resources, reducing patch cycles and overall workload.
Improved Executive Reporting
Exposure management enhances executive reporting by offering enhanced transparency and effectiveness. It delivers quantifiable insights into cyber risks by translating them into financial and business impacts and simplifying the communication of complex security issues, making them more relatable and understandable for non-technical stakeholders.
Furthermore, exposure management facilitates quicker investigation and incident response. By providing asset and exposure data to SOC analysts, it reduces the time needed to investigate and respond to threats.
Regarding SEC reporting, exposure management also aids CISOs in easily identifying and reporting material assets, apps and risks, ensuring accurate and timely disclosures.
Conclusion
In summary, exposure management offers a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity by addressing various security weaknesses, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and outdated systems, control gaps, and more.
Unlike traditional vulnerability management, which focuses solely on patching known vulnerabilities, exposure management aims to reduce overall risk through a structured assessment, risk-based prioritization, validation, and mobilization process that considers all types of exposures and different types of risk mitigation options. This broader perspective enhances an organization’s ability to manage its attack surface effectively, maintain a robust security posture, and burn down its cyber risk.
Request a demo today to see how Balbix can help you accomplish exposure management.
