Business Resilience Platform
A Business Resilience Platform (BRP) in the context of cybersecurity is a comprehensive, integrated system designed to enable an organization to rapidly adapt to, respond to, and recover from disruptive cyber events, minimizing the overall impact on critical business functions. It moves beyond traditional disaster recovery by focusing on business continuity rather than just IT infrastructure recovery.
Core Components and Focus
A BRP is not a single tool but a strategic framework supported by technology that merges various disciplines to ensure the organization's mission endures the shock of an attack.
1. Business Impact and Continuity Focus
The BRP's primary focus is on maintaining critical business processes, not simply technical systems.
Prioritization: It first maps and prioritizes an organization's most critical functions, determining their maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) and recovery point objective (RPO).
Scenario Planning: The platform enables the modeling of various cyber threat scenarios (e.g., ransomware, supply chain compromise, data breach) to test the robustness of response plans against real-world attack vectors.
2. Integrated Risk and Compliance Management
A BRP ties cyber defense directly to governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) objectives.
Risk Quantification: It quantifies cyber risk in financial or business terms, allowing leadership to make informed decisions on where to allocate resilience investments.
Regulatory Mapping: It automatically maps cyber incident response and recovery activities to regulatory requirements (such as HIPAA, GDPR, or PCI DSS), ensuring compliance even during a crisis.
3. Orchestration and Automation
The platform orchestrates the response across security, IT, and business units to achieve high-speed recovery.
Automated Runbooks: They use automation to execute predefined, cross-functional runbooks for critical tasks such as isolating compromised systems, initiating data restoration, and notifying relevant stakeholders.
Communication Hub: It acts as a unified command center, ensuring real-time, consistent communication and coordination among the incident response team, executive leadership, legal counsel, and public relations.
4. Continuous Validation and Learning
To ensure readiness, a BRP emphasizes constant testing and improvement.
Simulated Attacks: It facilitates regular, realistic testing of recovery procedures, often through controlled simulations that validate the functionality of backups and the effectiveness of established recovery workflows.
Post-Incident Analysis: After an event, it captures and analyzes performance metrics (e.g., time to detection, time to containment, time to recovery) to identify gaps and drive continuous improvement in the organization’s overall resilience posture.
The BRP elevates cybersecurity from a technical function to a core business function, ensuring that a cyberattack does not become a catastrophic business failure.
ThreatNG, which provides External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and Digital Risk Protection (DRP), plays a fundamental role in a Business Resilience Platform (BRP) by proactively identifying and prioritizing external threats most likely to cause business disruption or necessitate an expensive recovery. By focusing on the attacker's perspective, ThreatNG ensures real-world, unauthenticated exposure scenarios inform recovery plans.
The Role of ThreatNG in Business Resilience
ThreatNG helps the BRP shift from a reactive recovery posture to a proactive resilience posture by continuously assessing the organization's external risk profile.
External Discovery
ThreatNG performs a purely external unauthenticated discovery to identify all internet-facing assets—known and unknown—that an attacker could use to gain initial access. This capability is crucial for a BRP because undocumented or forgotten assets (Shadow IT) are often the weak link that leads to significant breaches.
Example of Discovery Helping Resilience: ThreatNG's Subdomain Intelligence identifies a forgotten development subdomain hosted on a third-party Cloud Platform such as Vercel or Heroku. This subdomain was never patched after being decommissioned. The BRP uses this finding to mandate either the immediate decommissioning of the asset or its securement, thereby closing an unintended, high-risk entry point that could have led to a catastrophic system compromise.
External Assessment (Risk Prioritization)
ThreatNG performs detailed external assessments that provide the BRP with risk-based prioritization. This ensures that BRP resources are allocated to mitigate the most impactful threats first, directly supporting the BRP's goal of minimizing disruption to critical business functions.
Cyber Risk Exposure: ThreatNG rates this (A-F) based on findings such as Subdomain intelligence (e.g., exposed ports, missing security headers like HSTS and X-Frame-Options, lack of automatic HTTPS redirect) and exposed Cloud Exposure (open cloud buckets).
Example: A low rating due to an exposed AWS cloud bucket indicates a direct path to a data leak. This immediately flags the associated business process (e.g., customer service data processing) within the BRP as high-risk, prompting the BRP to prioritize this data as critical for immediate protection and rapid recovery planning.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This rating (A-F) is derived from factors like Compromised Credentials and Exposed Ports.
Example: A high susceptibility score due to an exposed RDP port on a subdomain, coupled with recent Compromised Credentials from the Dark Web Presence, tells the BRP that the likelihood of a ransomware attack via remote desktop is imminent and high, allowing the BRP to preemptively isolate the asset or force multi-factor authentication on all exposed access points.
Reporting and Continuous Monitoring
Continuous Monitoring ensures the BRP's threat model is always current. It identifies new exposures and vulnerabilities as soon as they appear in the attack surface, preventing configuration drift from undermining resilience plans.
ThreatNG's Reporting delivers insights in Executive and Prioritized formats. The Executive reports provide security ratings (A-F) and the External GRC Assessment Mappings (e.g., PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST CSF).
Reporting Example: The Executive Report might show a failing grade for ESG Exposure due to new Financial or Consumer Protection offenses. This information feeds directly into the BRP's Crisis Communication Plan, giving executives context to manage the reputational fallout of a discovered external violation.
Investigation Modules and Intelligence Repositories
The Investigation Modules provide the detailed, actionable evidence needed to remove the external risk before a crisis occurs, which is the ultimate act of resilience.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: This module actively checks for "dangling DNS" states in which a CNAME record points to an inactive or unclaimed third-party service (e.g., an old Unbounce landing page or a Heroku app).
Example: If ThreatNG confirms a vulnerability, the BRP incident plan is triggered immediately to secure the dangling DNS record, preventing an attacker from claiming the subdomain to host a phishing site that could compromise the brand's security and reputation.
External Adversary View: ThreatNG provides findings that map directly to MITRE ATT&CK techniques, showing how an adversary might achieve initial access.
Example: A finding of Sensitive Code Discovery and Exposure in a public GitHub repository that reveals an AWS Access Key ID is mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK technique for Initial Access. The BRP immediately uses this narrative to prioritize the credential rotation and to run a forensic sweep across the internal cloud environment for signs of compromise, speeding up threat containment.
The Intelligence Repositories (DarCache) enrich the BRP's ability to prioritize and respond:
DarCache KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities): By cross-referencing discovered assets with vulnerabilities known to be actively being exploited in the wild, ThreatNG ensures the BRP prioritizes the most immediate, proven threats over theoretical risks.
DarCache Ransomware: Tracking over 70 ransomware gangs helps the BRP determine whether a discovered exposure, such as a new Compromised Credential, is linked to a group known to use specific attack patterns, tailoring the response plan accordingly.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's EASM data is essential for empowering a BRP by feeding it continuous, external, and contextualized risk intelligence.
Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR): ThreatNG's Continuous Monitoring identifies a new, critical risk—a missing DMARC record on a brand-related domain permutation. This high-risk finding, along with ThreatNG’s recommendations, is automatically ingested by a SOAR platform. The SOAR tool then triggers an automated workflow to notify the domain owner, open a high-priority ticket in the ticketing system, and begin deploying the correct DNS records, immediately and automatically reducing the organization's BEC & Phishing Susceptibility.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Platform: ThreatNG's External GRC Assessment continuously evaluates the organization against frameworks like NIST CSF and GDPR. When ThreatNG discovers an exposure, such as a cloud asset that violates a compliance control, it directly feeds the non-compliant status to a GRC Platform. The GRC platform then correlates this external technical finding with internal business units and ownership, providing a unified, auditable view of non-compliance to the risk committee, thereby streamlining the organization's overall risk management and reporting efforts.
