EASM-to-Audit Translation Layer
The EASM-to-Audit Translation Layer is a conceptual component in cybersecurity that acts as an intermediary function between an organization's External Attack Surface Management (EASM) program and its security and compliance auditing requirements. Its primary purpose is to convert the raw, technical data and risk scores generated by EASM tools into a format that is directly understandable, relevant, and actionable for regulatory compliance, internal policy audits, and risk reporting.
Function and Role
The core function of this translation layer is to bridge the gap between two distinct perspectives: the technical, adversarial view of EASM and the structured, standards-based view of auditing.
Normalization and Contextualization of EASM Data: EASM continuously discovers, monitors, and assesses all internet-facing assets—including known, unknown, and shadow IT—from an attacker's perspective. It generates a high volume of data on discovered domains, subdomains, IP addresses, cloud services, and associated vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, often with technical risk severity scores. The translation layer takes this disparate, attacker-centric data and maps it to the specific assets and business contexts understood by the compliance and risk teams. It filters out noise and aggregates findings into concise, prioritized security issues.
Mapping to Compliance Frameworks: Compliance audits, such as those related to ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, or GDPR, require evidence that specific security controls are implemented and effective. The translation layer correlates the security exposures identified by EASM (e.g., exposed administrative panels, unpatched services, expired SSL certificates) directly to the corresponding controls or requirements within these regulatory frameworks. For example, a finding of an open port on an asset containing customer data would be mapped to a specific access control or data protection clause in a compliance standard.
Generating Audit-Ready Documentation: It automates the creation of reports, evidence packets, and audit trails. EASM data, such as records of discovered assets, historical vulnerability assessments, and remediation confirmations, is organized and formatted into the standardized documentation required by internal and external auditors. This significantly reduces the manual effort and potential for error in compliance reporting.
Risk Quantification and Prioritization for Compliance: The layer translates EASM's technical risk ratings into a business-aligned risk score that considers the asset's criticality to the organization and its role in meeting compliance obligations. This allows auditors and risk officers to quickly focus on external exposures that pose the highest regulatory or business risk, ensuring that remediation efforts prioritize issues with compliance impact.
In essence, the EASM-to-Audit Translation Layer turns continuous, real-time exposure intelligence into verifiable evidence of a strong, proactive security posture that meets formal governance and compliance requirements, allowing organizations to demonstrate continuous accountability over their external attack surface.
ThreatNG effectively delivers the EASM-to-Audit Translation Layer function through a combination of its core capabilities, external focus, contextual intelligence, and alignment with Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) frameworks.
ThreatNG's Role in EASM-to-Audit Translation
ThreatNG serves as a powerful EASM-to-Audit tool, performing continuous, unauthenticated discovery and assessment of the organization's attack surface and translating the purely technical, adversarial view into a compliance-ready format.
1. External Discovery
ThreatNG's External Discovery is purely external and unauthenticated, meaning it finds assets from the attacker's perspective without needing internal connectors. This is the foundation, ensuring that the entire external attack surface, including shadow IT, is known and auditable.
2. External Assessment
The External Assessment capabilities translate raw exposure data into quantifiable risk ratings (A-F scale, where A is good and F is bad ) that can be directly mapped to GRC controls.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: This assessment directly checks for "dangling DNS" risk, a critical compliance concern. ThreatNG performs external discovery and DNS enumeration to find CNAME records pointing to third-party services, cross-referencing these against its comprehensive Vendor List (e.g., AWS/S3, Heroku, Shopify, Zendesk). It then performs a specific validation check to confirm if the CNAME is pointing to an inactive or unclaimed resource, prioritizing the risk. This evidence of a potential breach vector provides irrefutable proof that a specific cloud configuration control, or control over third-party assets, has failed.
Data Leak Susceptibility: The rating is derived from identifying risks such as exposed cloud buckets, compromised credentials, and known vulnerabilities, down to the subdomain level. An exposed cloud bucket (Cloud Exposure) directly violates data protection clauses in frameworks like HIPAA or GDPR, providing auditors with clear evidence of a compliance failure.
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: This assesses the presence of key security headers, such as Content-Security-Policy and HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS), as well as deprecated headers. These missing headers are directly tied to application security controls in standards like PCI DSS, providing a clear audit point.
External GRC Assessment: This capability explicitly maps identified exposed assets, critical vulnerabilities, and digital risks from an unauthenticated attacker's perspective directly to relevant GRC frameworks. This includes major standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST CSF, NIST 800-53, ISO 27001, and POPIA. This mapping is the heart of the translation layer, converting technical findings into an external GRC posture evaluation.
3. Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG provides Continuous Monitoring of the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings. This ensures that compliance is not a point-in-time check but an ongoing process, as required by modern risk management policies. New exposures are immediately identified, preventing a lapse in a required control between audit cycles.
4. Reporting
ThreatNG delivers structured Reporting, including Executive, Technical, Prioritized (High, Medium, Low, and Informational), and a Security Ratings report (A through F). Crucially for auditing, it provides External GRC Assessment Mappings reports for PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST CSF, and POPIA. These reports are the "translation" output, providing the auditor with a clear, prioritized list of external risks that directly correlate to GRC requirements.
5. Investigation Modules
The Investigation Modules provide deep, verifiable evidence to support audit findings. The Context Engine™ and Correlation Evidence Questionnaire (CEQ) are key here, leveraging multi-source data fusion to deliver Legal-Grade Attribution. This eliminates auditors' guesswork by converting technical findings into irrefutable evidence, resolving the Contextual Certainty Deficit.
Subdomain Intelligence includes checks for missing security headers for Content-Security-Policy, HSTS, X-Content-Type, and X-Frame-Options. This directly supports the audit by providing evidence of application security controls.
Sensitive Code Exposure uncovers digital risks like leaked API keys (e.g., Stripe API key, Google Cloud API Key) and cloud credentials (e.g., AWS Access Key ID, AWS Secret Access Key) from public code repositories. An auditor use this finding to confirm non-compliance with a policy control requiring all secrets to be vaulted.
Mobile Application Discovery identifies mobile apps in marketplaces and scans their content for exposed Access Credentials and Security Credentials (e.g., PGP private key block, RSA Private Key). This provides audit evidence regarding the security of mobile application development and deployment practices.
6. Intelligence Repositories
The Intelligence Repositories (DarCache) are the authoritative sources that provide context and certainty to the audit findings.
Vulnerabilities (DarCache Vulnerability) include NVD (for technical impact), KEV (actively exploited), EPSS (likelihood of future exploitation), and verified Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Exploits. An auditor can use a finding that an asset is exposed to a KEV vulnerability with a verified PoC Exploit to demonstrate that a control for prompt patching of critical, actively exploited flaws has failed.
ESG Violations (DarCache ESG) contains publicly disclosed offenses (e.g., Competition, Consumer, Environment). These findings directly map to the ethical and governance components of an organization's GRC posture.
Collaboration with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's output is structured to integrate with and enhance other security and GRC tools easily.
Complementary Solutions for Ticketing and Remediation: When ThreatNG identifies a critical external vulnerability, such as an exposed port with a known, actively exploited vulnerability, it uses its Legal-Grade Attribution to create an irrefutable finding. This high-certainty finding can be automatically fed into a security orchestration and automated response (SOAR) platform or an IT Service Management (ITSM) tool. This ensures the finding is assigned to the correct remediation team with the full context needed for immediate action, eliminating the "Hidden Tax on the SOC".
Complementary Solutions for GRC Platforms: The External GRC Assessment Mappings and the Policy Management features can align ThreatNG's external evidence with the internal data collected by a dedicated GRC platform. For instance, if an internal audit control requires the use of a Web Application Firewall (WAF) , ThreatNG's WAF Discovery and Vendor Identification can externally confirm its presence and vendor (e.g., Cloudflare, Imperva, F5 Networks) down to the subdomain level, providing objective, external validation for the GRC platform's compliance score.
By translating the chaotic, raw findings of the external attack surface into strategic, contextualized, and compliance-mandated evidence, ThreatNG provides the full scope of an EASM-to-Audit Translation Layer.
