Attacker's-Eye View Compliance
Attacker's-Eye View Compliance is a cybersecurity strategy that shifts an organization's focus from simply fulfilling regulatory checklists to actively defending against real-world threats. Instead of adopting a defensive mindset, it is essential to take the perspective of a malicious actor to identify and fix vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. This approach extends beyond traditional compliance, which can often be a static, point-in-time process that fails to account for new and evolving threats.
Traditional Compliance vs. Attacker's-Eye View
Traditional Compliance: This method typically involves periodic audits and checks to ensure an organization meets specific security standards, such as those established by frameworks like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). While important, a key weakness is that it often provides a "snapshot" in time, and an organization can appear compliant on paper but still have a weak security posture. It's a checkbox-driven approach that doesn't guarantee security.
Attacker's-Eye View: This is a more proactive, risk-based approach. It involves continuously assessing an organization's attack surface—all the potential entry points an attacker could use. This includes not just the obvious elements, such as firewalls and servers, but also overlooked aspects like shadow IT (unauthorized software), misconfigured cloud environments, and even the human element through social engineering threats. It recognizes that compliance is a baseline, not the ultimate goal.
How it Works
The Attacker's-Eye View Compliance model uses several methods to achieve its goals:
Red Teaming and Penetration Testing: Unlike standard security audits, these simulations are designed to mimic a real-world attack. A "red team" acts as an adversary, attempting to breach the organization's defenses, while a "blue team" defends the network. This process uncovers vulnerabilities that a simple compliance scan would miss, such as a weak link in a network or a specific configuration that could be exploited for a ransomware attack.
Continuous Attack Surface Management: This is the ongoing process of identifying, assessing, and mitigating an organization's attack surface. It involves using automated tools and manual analysis to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities in real-time. This ensures that as an organization's systems change and new threats emerge, its security posture is also continuously assessed and improved.
Threat Intelligence Integration: The strategy uses up-to-date threat intelligence to understand the latest TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) of cybercriminals. By knowing how and why attackers target organizations, a company can focus its resources on mitigating the most likely and impactful risks.
Benefits of the Approach
By adopting an Attacker's-Eye View, organizations gain a more realistic and practical security posture. It helps them:
Move Beyond "Checklist" Security: Instead of a false sense of security, they get a genuine understanding of their weaknesses.
Prioritize Risk: It allows security teams to focus on the most critical vulnerabilities that are likely to be exploited rather than every single one on a list.
Increase Resilience: By constantly testing and adapting defenses, the organization becomes more resilient to sophisticated and evolving threats.
ThreatNG helps organizations achieve Attacker's-Eye View Compliance by continuously assessing their external attack surface from the perspective of an unauthenticated adversary. It moves beyond traditional, checklist-based compliance by identifying and addressing real-world, exploitable vulnerabilities.
External Discovery & Assessment
ThreatNG performs purely external and unauthenticated discovery to map an organization's digital footprint. It identifies a wide range of assets, including subdomains, mobile applications, and code repositories, without needing internal access or credentials. This approach identifies "shadow IT" and other overlooked assets that traditional internal scanners may overlook. For example, it can find a subdomain like test.yourcompany.com that was left exposed with an outdated server, or an open Amazon S3 bucket that's publicly accessible. ThreatNG's external assessment capabilities provide a detailed view of an organization's susceptibility to various cyber risks:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: It analyzes external parts of a web application to find potential entry points for attackers. For example, it might identify that a login page is vulnerable to hijacking due to a misconfiguration.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: ThreatNG examines a website's subdomains, DNS records, and SSL certificate statuses to assess the risk of a subdomain takeover.
Non-Human Identity (NHI) Exposure: This score identifies risks associated with non-human identities, such as API keys, service accounts, and system accounts. These are often prime targets for adversaries because they outnumber human identities and are frequently mismanaged. The score looks for compromised NHIs by analyzing sensitive code exposure in repositories and mobile apps, discovering exposed APIs, and finding NHI-specific email addresses. For instance, it might find an API key exposed in a public GitHub repository, which an attacker could use to gain unauthorized access.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: The tool calculates a score based on exposed sensitive ports, exposed private IPs, known vulnerabilities, and compromised credentials found on the dark web. For example, it might detect an open RDP port (Remote Desktop Protocol) with a known vulnerability and also find a compromised administrator's credentials on the dark web, flagging the organization as highly susceptible to a ransomware attack.
External GRC Assessment
ThreatNG's External GRC Assessment is a key component of its Attacker's-Eye View approach. It continuously evaluates an organization's Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) posture from an outside-in perspective, mapping its findings directly to GRC frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and POPIA. This helps an organization proactively identify and address external security and compliance gaps.
For instance, to help with PCI DSS compliance, ThreatNG identifies exposed assets and critical vulnerabilities that an unauthenticated attacker could use to access cardholder data. It might be discovered that a system handling payments has an open port or is running an outdated, vulnerable software version. For HIPAA, it could expose sensitive patient information through an unsecured cloud bucket or an improperly configured API, directly indicating a compliance violation from the perspective of an attacker.
Continuous Monitoring & Reporting
ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings of all organizations. It offers a variety of reports, including executive, technical, and prioritized reports (high, medium, low, and informational). These reports include risk levels, reasoning behind the findings, and practical recommendations for risk reduction. For example, an executive report might show an overall "F" security rating due to a high susceptibility to a ransomware attack. In contrast, a technical report would provide specific details on the exposed ports, vulnerable services, and compromised credentials that led to that score.
Investigation Modules & Intelligence Repositories
ThreatNG's investigation modules enable in-depth analysis of discovery and assessment results. The Domain Intelligence module, for example, can uncover domain name permutations that attackers might use for phishing campaigns. It can detect misspellings of your domain like mycompaany.com or variations with different top-level domains like .net or .org. The Sensitive Code Exposure module can identify sensitive data, such as API keys, passwords, and security credentials, that is exposed in public code repositories or mobile apps.
ThreatNG uses intelligence repositories, branded as DarCache, to provide contextual data. The DarCache Vulnerability repository goes beyond simple CVE information from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) by integrating Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) data, which estimates the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited, and the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, which lists vulnerabilities actively being exploited in the wild. It also provides links to verified Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploits, enabling security teams to understand how an attacker could leverage a vulnerability.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's Attacker's-Eye View approach can be enhanced when working with other solutions.
Internal Vulnerability Management Platforms: While ThreatNG identifies externally exploitable vulnerabilities, an internal vulnerability management platform focuses on internal network assets. The synergy between them provides a complete picture of an organization's vulnerabilities—both external and internal. For example, ThreatNG might identify a web application firewall (WAF) bypass vulnerability on a public-facing web app, and an internal scanner might find an unpatched operating system vulnerability on the same server. The combined intelligence highlights a critical attack path that an attacker could use to gain external access and then escalate privileges on the internal network.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Solutions: ThreatNG can identify data leak susceptibility through external sources, such as exposed cloud buckets or the presence on the dark web. This information can be fed to a DLP solution, which can then be configured to prevent similar data from being exfiltrated from internal systems, closing off another potential path for data leakage.
