DSPM

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is an emerging, data-centric approach within cybersecurity that focuses on identifying, assessing, and continuously improving an organization's security and compliance stance, specifically around its sensitive data assets.

Unlike traditional security methods that primarily focus on securing the infrastructure (such as networks, servers, and applications), DSPM inverts this model to put the data itself first. It addresses the complex challenge of data sprawl across hybrid, multi-cloud, and SaaS environments, ensuring sensitive data is correctly protected regardless of where it resides or moves.

Core Principles and Components of DSPM

DSPM is a continuous lifecycle that typically involves four main phases, often automated by specialized tools:

1. Data Discovery and Classification

The foundational step is to gain complete visibility into all data.

• Discovery: DSPM tools scan an organization's entire digital estate (cloud databases, object storage, data lakes, SaaS apps, on-premises systems) to locate all structured and unstructured data, including previously unknown or "shadow" data.

• Classification: Once discovered, data is automatically categorized based on its sensitivity, regulatory requirements, and business value (e.g., Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), financial data, intellectual property, or confidential internal data). This classification is crucial for prioritizing security efforts.

2. Continuous Risk Assessment and Monitoring

After identifying and classifying the data, DSPM continuously assesses the potential risks surrounding it.

• Vulnerability Detection: It looks for security flaws and misconfigurations in the data's environment that could lead to exposure. Common risks include:

  • Misconfigurations: Unsecured data buckets or databases that are publicly accessible or lack encryption.

  • Over-permissioning (Overentitlements): Granting users, services, or roles more access privileges than they need, violating the principle of least privilege.

  • Toxic Combinations: Finding a highly sensitive data store that is also critically misconfigured and has excessive access permissions.

• Access Governance: It monitors data flows and access patterns in real-time, mapping who (users, roles, services) can access the sensitive data, how they are using it, and where the data is moving (its lineage). This helps detect anomalies that could indicate insider threats or a breach.

• Compliance Auditing: The security posture of the data is checked against internal policies and external regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA, identifying violations that put the organization at risk of fines.

3. Risk Prioritization and Remediation

When risks are identified, DSPM helps security teams take rapid, informed action.

• Prioritization: Risks are scored and prioritized based on the sensitivity of the data involved and the severity of the vulnerability (e.g., public exposure of PHI is a critical, high-priority risk).

• Remediation: DSPM provides actionable guidance or automated capabilities to fix the identified issues. This can involve tightening access controls, revoking excessive permissions, applying encryption, or flagging redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data for deletion to reduce the attack surface and cut cloud costs.

4. Policy Enforcement and Prevention

The final stage closes the loop by enforcing security controls to prevent the recurrence of identified issues and maintain a strong posture.

• Policy Enforcement: Ensuring data protection policies (like mandatory encryption, specific retention rules, and strict access controls) are consistently applied across all data stores, regardless of their environment.

• Reporting: Generating audit-ready reports that demonstrate continuous compliance and security improvement to stakeholders and regulators.

Importance in the Modern Cybersecurity Landscape

DSPM is vital because the rapid adoption of cloud services, hybrid environments, and DevOps practices has led to data sprawl, making it difficult to know exactly where sensitive data resides and if it is adequately protected. By focusing on the data itself, DSPM provides:

1. Reduced Attack Surface: By identifying and securing all sensitive data, including shadow data, and enforcing least privilege access, the opportunity for a successful data breach is minimized.

2. Compliance Assurance: It automates the monitoring and enforcement of regulatory requirements, making it easier to meet compliance mandates and avoid costly penalties.

3. Data-Centric Security: It ensures the most valuable asset—the data—is the primary focus of security efforts, providing context to infrastructure and configuration alerts. For example, a misconfigured cloud resource is only a critical security issue if it holds sensitive, unencrypted PII.

ThreatNG's Role in the DSPM Lifecycle

ThreatNG's capabilities directly map to the core phases of DSPM: Discovery, Risk Assessment, Continuous Monitoring, and Remediation/Governance. It provides the "outside-in" view of an organization’s digital footprint to identify exposed data and vulnerabilities that an adversary could exploit to gain initial access or achieve persistence.

External Discovery (Visibility)

ThreatNG initiates the DSPM process with External Discovery, a purely external, unauthenticated process that utilizes no connectors. This creates a comprehensive inventory of the organization's exposed assets, serving as the necessary first step to know what data could be at risk. This discovery includes:

• Code Repository Exposure: Locating public code repositories where sensitive information might be inadvertently published.

• Mobile Application Discovery: Finding the organization's mobile apps in marketplaces to check their contents for exposed credentials.

• Search Engine Exploitation: Discovering if search engines are exposing sensitive files, user data, or privileged folders through misconfigured website control files like robots.txt or through a Search Engine Attack Surface scan.

• Cloud and SaaS Exposure: Identifying sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services, as well as open exposed cloud buckets (such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform) that could contain sensitive data.

External Assessment (Risk Identification)

The discovered assets are then subjected to detailed external assessments to determine the security posture of the exposed data. ThreatNG’s assessments are derived from its intelligence and findings across the external attack surface and digital risk landscape. Examples of these crucial data-related assessments include:

• Data Leak Susceptibility: This is a core DSPM metric, determined by analyzing factors like Cloud and SaaS Exposure (unsecured cloud buckets), Dark Web Presence (compromised credentials), and Domain Intelligence (DNS and Email Intelligence). If a public cloud bucket is open and contains PII, the Data Leak Susceptibility score would be immediately impacted.

• Cyber Risk Exposure: This score is determined by parameters in Domain Intelligence (such as exposed sensitive ports and vulnerabilities) and is further amplified by two specific, data-centric factors: Code Secret Exposure, which identifies exposed code repositories and sensitive data within them, and Compromised Credentials found on the dark web.

• Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This assesses the likelihood of a significant incident, which is significantly influenced by exposed sensitive ports, known vulnerabilities, compromised credentials, and ransomware event mentions on the dark web.

Continuous Monitoring and Reporting

Effective DSPM requires a dynamic security process, not a static one. ThreatNG supports this by offering Continuous Monitoring of the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings for all organizations under scrutiny. This ensures that as an adversary's tactics evolve or as the organization deploys new services, the external data posture is constantly checked.

• Reporting: The solution provides various reports essential for risk communication and governance, including Security Ratings (A through F), Ransomware Susceptibility, and External GRC Assessment Mappings for frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR. For instance, the External GRC Assessment provides an outside-in evaluation of an organization's Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) posture, mapping exposed assets and critical vulnerabilities directly to GRC frameworks.

• Knowledgebase: To facilitate remediation, its embedded Knowledgebase provides:

  • Risk levels to prioritize security efforts.

  • Reasoning to help security teams understand the context of the risk and their security posture.

  • Recommendations offering practical guidance on reducing the risk.

Investigation Modules (Contextualization and Deep Dive)

ThreatNG provides Investigation Modules that allow security teams to drill down into specific findings, providing the necessary context to move from a risk alert to a targeted remediation plan. This is essential for understanding how a data exposure occurred and what data is at stake.

• Sensitive Code Exposure: This module identifies specific, highly sensitive data within code repositories, including various API Keys (e.g., Stripe, Google Cloud), AWS Credentials, Cryptographic Keys (e.g., PGP private key block), and Database Credentials. Finding a GitHub Access Token in an exposed repository provides the exact context needed to revoke the token and secure the repository immediately.

• Domain Intelligence: This module provides granular context on the organization's internet presence. For example, DNS Intelligence can identify vendors and technology used, such as Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft (Azure), or Data Warehousing & Processing vendors like Databricks. This is crucial for DSPM because it directly links an exposed asset (e.g., a subdomain) to the underlying technology that might be misconfigured.

• NHI Email Exposure: This capability specifically groups emails associated with non-human and high-value roles like Admin, Security, Devops, or Service (svc). Finding an NHI email in a compromise report (e.g., from Compromised Credentials or an Archived Web Page) indicates a much higher-priority risk to the data security posture than a general employee email.

• Social Media: The Reddit Discovery module acts as an early warning system by transforming public chatter, known as the Conversational Attack Surface, into high-fidelity intelligence for proactive management of Narrative Risk.

Intelligence Repositories (Prioritization)

ThreatNG’s continuously updated Intelligence Repositories (DarCache) allow security teams to prioritize risk based on real-world threat information. This is key for effective DSPM, which cannot afford to treat all risks equally.

• Vulnerabilities (DarCache Vulnerability): This fuses multiple intelligence feeds to prioritize exposures. For instance, finding a vulnerability that affects a database server is a high risk to data, but seeing that it is listed in the KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) as actively being exploited in the wild, or having a high EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) probability of future exploitation, makes it an immediate, critical data risk that security teams must address first. The repository also provides direct links to Verified Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Exploits, helping the team understand how the data could be compromised.

• Dark Web: The DarCache Dark Web repositories track Compromised Credentials and Ransomware Groups and Activities. Finding an organization's credentials in DarCache Rupture is a direct, critical threat to the confidentiality and integrity of their data stores.

Complementary Solutions and Synergies

While ThreatNG is a purely external solution, its output provides critical context for internal security and governance tools, creating a powerful synergy for a complete DSPM solution.

• ThreatNG and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM):

  • ThreatNG's External Discovery identifies an exposed, publicly-accessible AWS S3 bucket.

  • Synergy: This finding can be fed into a CSPM solution, which operates inside the cloud environment. The CSPM tool can then immediately analyze the S3 bucket's internal configurations to verify if a highly sensitive data object (like a file containing PII) is inside and confirm that the policy protecting it is compliant. This ensures that the external exposure (seen by ThreatNG) is immediately correlated with the internal content and compliance (seen by the CSPM), enabling a complete, data-aware fix.

• ThreatNG and Identity and Access Management (IAM) Tools:

  • ThreatNG's External Assessment detects instances of over-permissioning or identifies compromised credentials in the DarCache Rupture repository.

  • Synergy: The identity or role associated with the compromised credential (e.g., an exposed service account) can be immediately identified within the organization's IAM platform (like Azure Active Directory or Okta, which are noted as being covered in ThreatNG's Cloud and SaaS Exposure). This allows the security team to use the IAM tool to instantly revoke the exposed credential and enforce the principle of least privilege, mitigating the risk of unauthorized lateral movement to access sensitive data.

• ThreatNG and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) / Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms:

  • ThreatNG's MITRE ATT&CK Mapping translates a raw finding (e.g., an exposed private SSH key from Sensitive Code Exposure) into the strategic narrative of an adversary technique, such as Initial Access.

  • Synergy: This context can be automatically ingested by a SOAR platform. The SOAR system can then use the ThreatNG's Knowledgebase Recommendations to trigger an automated workflow: alert the asset owner, create a high-priority ticket with the Reasoning and Risk Level, and automatically scan internal systems for signs of exploitation based on the identified MITRE ATT&CK technique, shifting the security team from manual searching to decisive action.