The new feature provides continuous visibility and assessment of an organization’s external attack surface, helping security teams identify and mitigate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited
A vulnerable attack surface exposes a company to cyberattacks. However, constantly monitoring and assessing its condition requires a great deal of time and human resources. To help security teams be more efficient, NordStellar, a next-generation threat exposure management platform, has introduced attack surface management (ASM) — a feature designed to automatically discover security gaps by constantly monitoring and evaluating all of the organization’s internet-exposed assets.
“Any security gaps in a company’s websites, servers, applications, cloud resources, or internet of things devices are a ticking time bomb, and it’s vital to identify and mitigate these vulnerabilities before attackers have a chance to act,” says Vakaris Noreika, head of product at NordStellar. “By introducing ASM, we aim to help improve our clients’ overall security posture, ensuring that their security teams are equipped with insights needed to effectively manage their attack surface, minimize exposure to external threats, and meet regulatory requirements for vulnerability assessments.”
The ASM consists of two modules: automatic asset discovery and external vulnerability management. Automatic asset discovery maps infrastructure by running various domain enumeration processes that allow it to automatically identify and catalog all internet-exposed assets associated with the organization, such as web servers, applications, and other network-connected devices. External vulnerability management monitors and scans the discovered assets for known vulnerabilities, providing vulnerability intelligence for more efficient recovery efforts.
“ASM helps to reduce companies’ attack surface by identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities, minimizing the potential for successful attacks. It also offers enhanced visibility into shadow IT so the security team can discover and manage unauthorized IT resources that pose security risks,” says Noreika. “The feature increases operational efficiency because attack surface management tasks are automated, and the risks are prioritized in order to focus remediation efforts on the most critical cases.”
How it works:
- Implements automatic asset discovery using various techniques, including DNS enumeration, web crawling, and other OSINT techniques to identify all internet-exposed assets associated with the organization.
- Conducts vulnerability assessments by scanning the discovered assets for known vulnerabilities using passive service fingerprinting.
- Prioritizes identified vulnerabilities by evaluating them according to their severity, exploitability, and potential impact.
- Provides real-time alerts about new vulnerabilities and changes to the attack surface to the organization’s security team and comprehensive reports for a detailed overview of the company’s attack surface and associated risks.
ASM is now available to all NordStellar users. More information here.
