External Attack Surface Blindness
External Attack Surface Blindness is a cybersecurity term that describes an organization's lack of visibility into its own public-facing digital assets and the potential security risks they present. It occurs when a company is unaware of all the internet-exposed systems, applications, and data that attackers could target. This "blindness" can be a significant vulnerability because it prevents security teams from defending assets they are unaware of.
Causes of External Attack Surface Blindness
Several factors can lead to this condition:
Shadow IT: Unauthorized or unmonitored systems and applications are deployed by employees or departments without the knowledge of the IT or security team.
Mergers and Acquisitions: When a company acquires another, the newly inherited IT infrastructure may include a variety of public-facing assets that are not adequately integrated into the parent company's security monitoring.
Rapid Digital Transformation: The quick adoption of new cloud services, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, and internet of things (IoT) devices can create new external exposures faster than security teams can track them.
Forgotten Assets: Old or decommissioned servers, test environments, or subdomains that were never properly taken down can remain active and vulnerable to attack.
The Dangers of Being Blind
External attack surface blindness poses several significant risks to an organization:
Increased Likelihood of Breach: Attackers actively search for vulnerable, unmonitored assets. A company that is unaware of its whole attack surface is an easier target for initial access.
Ineffective Patching and Remediation: Without a complete inventory of assets, security teams cannot apply patches to all vulnerable systems, leaving known weaknesses exposed.
Uninformed Risk Management: It is impossible to accurately assess an organization's overall cyber risk without a complete understanding of its external exposures.
Compliance Failures: Many regulatory frameworks require organizations to maintain a complete inventory of their IT assets. Failure to do so can result in fines and penalties.
Addressing the Problem
To combat this, organizations must proactively and continuously discover and monitor their external attack surface. This includes performing regular scans, using specialized tools, and maintaining a centralized inventory of all internet-exposed assets. By gaining complete visibility, security teams can effectively manage their digital risk and defend against a broader range of threats.
ThreatNG helps address external attack surface blindness by providing a comprehensive, attacker-centric view of an organization's publicly accessible digital footprint. It operates without requiring internal connectors, enabling it to discover and assess assets from an external perspective, including assets that a company may not even be aware it owns, such as forgotten domains or shadow IT.
ThreatNG's external discovery capabilities are the foundation for its approach. It performs unauthenticated discovery, which means it finds an organization's internet-facing assets in the same way an attacker would, without any special access. This process identifies a wide range of assets, including domains, subdomains, cloud and SaaS services, and mobile apps. This is crucial for uncovering "unknown unknowns"—assets that are part of the external attack surface but are not monitored or managed by the security team.
For example, a marketing department might launch a new microsite on a subdomain or a third-party service without informing the IT security team, creating a blind spot. ThreatNG would discover this asset and its associated risks, such as outdated software or misconfigurations, before an attacker could exploit it.
ThreatNG's external assessment capabilities transform the raw discovery data into actionable intelligence by generating detailed risk scores and ratings. This provides a clear, prioritized view of an organization's susceptibility to various attacks.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This score is derived from a mix of external attack surface intelligence, dark web presence, and financial data. For instance, if ThreatNG identifies an exposed sensitive port on a server and also finds evidence of a known ransomware gang targeting that specific vulnerability, it can provide a high susceptibility rating, giving security teams a clear, prioritized issue to address.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This assessment helps uncover an organization's vulnerability to business email compromise and phishing attacks. It uses DNS intelligence to detect and group domain name permutations—like typosquatted domains such as microsfot.com instead of microsoft.com—that an attacker could use for a convincing phishing campaign.
Mobile App Exposure: ThreatNG evaluates how exposed an organization's mobile apps are by discovering them in various app marketplaces and checking for sensitive data. It can find exposed credentials, such as AWS API keys or user IDs, that were accidentally left in the app's code, which could lead to a data breach.
ThreatNG offers various types of reports to ensure the correct information reaches the intended recipients. Executive Reports provide a summary for leadership, while Technical Reports offer a deep dive into the findings. The Prioritized Report is beneficial for combating blindness, as it classifies risks by severity (high, medium, low). This allows security teams to focus their limited resources on the most critical exposures that pose the greatest threat.
ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of an organization's external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings. This ensures that as new assets are deployed, configurations change, or new vulnerabilities are discovered, the platform immediately updates its assessment. This capability is essential for managing a constantly evolving attack surface and for preventing new blind spots from forming.
ThreatNG's investigation modules enable security teams to drill down into the details of a finding, providing a comprehensive understanding of the threat's full context.
Domain Intelligence: This module provides a comprehensive overview of a domain's digital presence. For instance, its DNS Intelligence can perform a thorough analysis of a website's subdomains, DNS records, and SSL certificate statuses to evaluate its Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility. It can uncover a forgotten subdomain that is vulnerable to takeover because its DNS record still points to a third-party service that has since ceased to exist.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module discovers and analyzes public code repositories for exposed credentials, keys, and configuration files. An example would be if an employee accidentally pushed a Git configuration file containing their AWS access key to a public repository, ThreatNG would find it, providing a direct link to a critical vulnerability that the organization was likely unaware of.
Dark Web Presence: This module monitors for organizational mentions, compromised credentials, and ransomware events on the dark web. Suppose ThreatNG discovers a batch of compromised employee credentials from a third-party breach for sale on a dark web forum. In that case, this intelligence provides immediate context to a potential internal threat that could be tied to an external exposure.
ThreatNG's continuously updated intelligence repositories, known as DarCache, provide the contextual data that powers its assessments.
DarCache Vulnerability: This repository contains data from multiple sources, including the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), and a list of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV). By combining these, ThreatNG can go beyond just the technical severity of a vulnerability (NVD) to assess its probability of being exploited in the near future (EPSS) and whether it is actively being exploited in the wild (KEV). This allows organizations to prioritize remediation on vulnerabilities that pose an immediate and proven threat.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external-facing contextual intelligence can be significantly enhanced when used with other cybersecurity solutions that provide internal visibility.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms: ThreatNG can send its alerts on external exposures to a SIEM. For example, suppose ThreatNG identifies a newly exposed database on the internet. In that case, the SIEM can correlate this external alert with internal logs that show unusual login attempts on the database from a foreign IP address. This helps a security team connect external threats to suspicious internal activity, providing a comprehensive view of potential attacks.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions: ThreatNG can provide external context for internal threats detected by an EDR. If ThreatNG flags that an employee's credentials were found on the dark web, an EDR can then monitor that user's endpoint for signs of compromise, such as unusual file access or connections to malicious servers. This synergy enables a targeted investigation and a faster response.
