External Cyber Threats
External cyber threats refer to malicious activities, attacks, or potential risks that originate outside an organization's direct control and target its digital assets, infrastructure, data, reputation, or personnel. These threats leverage the internet, public networks, and other external channels to compromise an organization's security.
Here's a breakdown of the key aspects of external cyber threats:
1. Origin Beyond the Perimeter:
The defining characteristic is their source. They don't originate within the organization's internal network or trusted systems. Instead, they come from the vast and often untrusted external environment, including the public internet, third-party infrastructure, and individual threat actors operating remotely.
2. Diverse Threat Actors:
External threats are launched by various actors with varying motivations and capabilities. These include:
Nation-State Actors: Sophisticated groups sponsored by governments, often focused on espionage, sabotage, or intellectual property theft.
Organized Cybercrime Groups: Criminal enterprises motivated by financial gain, engaging in activities like ransomware attacks, data theft for sale, and online fraud.
Hacktivists: Individuals or groups driven by ideological or political agendas, often targeting organizations to disrupt operations or publicize their cause.
Script Kiddies: Less skilled individuals who use readily available tools and scripts to attempt attacks.
Malicious Insiders (acting externally): While originating from within, if a former or disgruntled employee uses external channels to attack the organization, it can be considered an external threat in its execution.
Competitors: In some cases, though less common, competitors might engage in cyber espionage or disruptive activities.
3. Broad Range of Targets:
External cyber threats can target various aspects of an organization's digital presence:
External-facing infrastructure: Websites, web applications, APIs, cloud services, email servers, DNS servers, and other publicly accessible systems.
Data stored externally: Information in cloud storage, third-party platforms, or exposed databases.
Employees: Through social engineering tactics like phishing, targeting their devices or accounts that might have connections to the organization.
Customers and Partners: Attacks that leverage an organization's infrastructure to target its customers or supply chain partners.
Brand and Reputation: Through impersonation, misinformation campaigns, or defacement of online assets.
4. Varied Attack Vectors and Techniques:
External threat actors employ a multitude of methods to achieve their objectives:
Exploiting vulnerabilities: Leveraging weaknesses in software, hardware, or configurations of external-facing systems.
Social Engineering: Manipulating individuals into divulging sensitive information or performing harmful actions.
Malware distribution: Spreading malicious software through compromised websites, email attachments, or drive-by downloads.
Denial-of-Service attacks: Overwhelming external-facing services with traffic to disrupt availability.
Data breaches and leaks: Gaining unauthorized access to and exfiltrating sensitive data.
Account takeover: Compromising user accounts on external platforms.
Supply chain attacks: Targeting an organization indirectly through vendors or partners with external-facing connections.
5. Constant Evolution and Sophistication:
The landscape of external cyber threats is constantly evolving. Attackers continuously develop new techniques, tools, and strategies to evade defenses and exploit emerging technologies. This necessitates ongoing vigilance and adaptation in security measures.
In the context of External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Digital Risk Protection (DRP), and Security Ratings:
EASM focuses on identifying, analyzing, and mitigating vulnerabilities and risks associated with an organization's entire external digital footprint, which is the primary target of external cyber threats.
DRP addresses external threats that impact an organization's brand, reputation, and digital assets beyond technical vulnerabilities, such as phishing campaigns, brand impersonation, and data leaks on the dark web.
Security Ratings provide an objective, data-driven assessment of an organization's likelihood of experiencing an external cyber threat based on externally observable security indicators.
Understanding and addressing external cyber threats is paramount for any organization in today's interconnected digital world. A robust cybersecurity strategy must include proactive measures to identify, monitor, and defend against these threats from beyond the traditional network perimeter.
ThreatNG is a powerful solution comprehensively addressing external cyber threats through its various modules and capabilities. Here's a detailed explanation of how ThreatNG effectively helps organizations in this domain:
ThreatNG excels in external discovery by performing purely external unauthenticated discovery, eliminating the need for connectors.
This capability allows ThreatNG to map out an organization's entire external attack surface, identifying all internet-facing assets that could be potential entry points for cyber threats.
ThreatNG provides a wide range of external assessment capabilities, delivering in-depth insights into an organization's susceptibility to various cyber threats:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: ThreatNG analyzes web applications to pinpoint potential weaknesses that attackers could exploit to hijack them. It achieves this by assessing externally accessible parts of the application and incorporating domain intelligence.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: ThreatNG evaluates the risk of subdomain takeovers by analyzing subdomains, DNS records, and SSL certificate statuses. This assessment helps organizations prevent attackers from taking control of their subdomains.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: ThreatNG assesses an organization's vulnerability to Business Email Compromise (BEC) and phishing attacks. It does this by leveraging sentiment and financial findings, domain intelligence (including DNS intelligence and email intelligence), and dark web presence (compromised credentials). For example, ThreatNG can identify domain name permutations that could be used in phishing campaigns.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: ThreatNG assesses the likelihood of brand damage stemming from cyber threats. This assessment incorporates attack surface intelligence, digital risk intelligence, ESG violations, sentiment and financials (e.g., lawsuits, SEC filings, negative news), and domain intelligence (including domain name permutations). For instance, ThreatNG can detect domain name permutations that could be used to impersonate an organization's brand.
Data Leak Susceptibility: ThreatNG evaluates the risk of data leaks by analyzing cloud and SaaS exposure, dark web presence (compromised credentials), domain intelligence, sentiment, and financials (e.g., lawsuits, SEC Form 8-Ks). This helps organizations protect sensitive data from unauthorized disclosure.
Cyber Risk Exposure: ThreatNG determines cyber risk exposure by considering domain intelligence parameters like certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, and sensitive ports. It also involves code secret exposure (discovering exposed code repositories with sensitive data) and cloud and SaaS exposure. Furthermore, ThreatNG considers compromised credentials on the dark web, which can significantly increase the risk of successful attacks.
ESG Exposure: ThreatNG rates organizations based on discovered environmental, social, and governance (ESG) violations using external attack surface and digital risk intelligence. It analyzes offenses across various areas, including competition, consumer, employment, and environmental issues.
Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure: ThreatNG assesses supply chain and third-party exposure using domain intelligence (enumeration of vendor technologies), technology stack analysis, and cloud and SaaS exposure analysis. This helps organizations understand and mitigate risks associated with their vendors and partners.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: ThreatNG calculates breach and ransomware susceptibility based on external attack surface and digital risk intelligence. This includes domain intelligence (exposed sensitive ports, exposed private IPs, and known vulnerabilities), dark web presence (compromised credentials and ransomware events), and sentiment and financials (SEC Form 8-Ks).
Mobile App Exposure: ThreatNG evaluates an organization's mobile app exposure by discovering them in marketplaces and analyzing their contents for access credentials, security credentials, and platform-specific identifiers. This helps organizations secure their mobile app ecosystem.
Positive Security Indicators: Uniquely, ThreatNG also identifies and highlights an organization's security strengths. Instead of solely focusing on vulnerabilities, it detects beneficial security controls and configurations, such as Web Application Firewalls or multi-factor authentication, validating their effectiveness from an external attacker's perspective.
3. Reporting:
ThreatNG offers comprehensive reporting capabilities, including executive, technical, prioritized (high, medium, low, and informational), security ratings, inventory, ransomware susceptibility, and U.S. SEC Filings reports.
These reports provide valuable insights into an organization's security posture and risks, enabling informed decision-making.
ThreatNG continuously monitors all organizations' external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings.
This continuous monitoring enables organizations to stay ahead of emerging threats and proactively address any changes in their risk posture.
ThreatNG includes powerful investigation modules that enable in-depth analysis of various aspects of an organization's external presence:
Domain Intelligence: This module provides a comprehensive overview of an organization's digital presence, including:
Domain Overview (Digital Presence Word Cloud, Microsoft Entra Identification and Domain Enumeration, Bug Bounty Programs, and related SwaggerHub instances)
DNS Intelligence (Domain Record Analysis, Domain Name Permutations, and Web3 Domains)
Email Intelligence (Security Presence, Format Predictions, and Harvested Emails)
WHOIS Intelligence (WHOIS Analysis and Other Domains Owned)
Subdomain Intelligence (HTTP Responses, Header Analysis, Server Headers, Cloud Hosting, Website Builders, E-commerce Platforms, Content Management Systems, and various other technologies)
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility, Content Identification, Ports (IoT/OT, Industrial Control Systems, Databases, Remote Access Services), Known Vulnerabilities, and Web Application Firewall Discovery.
IP Intelligence: This module provides information about IPs, Shared IPs, ASNs, Country Locations, and Private IPs.
Certificate Intelligence: This module analyzes TLS Certificates (Status, Issuers, Active, Certs without Subdomains, Subdomains without Certificates) and Associated Organizations.
Social Media: This module analyzes social media posts from the organization.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module discovers public code repositories and uncovers digital risks, including exposed Access Credentials, Access Tokens, Generic Credentials, Cloud Credentials, Security Credentials, Other Secrets, Configuration Files, System Configuration, and Network Configuration. It also identifies Database Exposures, Application Data Exposures, Activity Records, Communication Platform Configurations, Development Environment Configurations, Security Testing Tools, Cloud Service Configurations, Remote Access Credentials, System Utilities, Personal Data, and User Activity.
Mobile Application Discovery: This module discovers mobile apps in marketplaces and analyzes their contents for Access Credentials, Security Credentials, and Platform-Specific Identifiers.
Search Engine Exploitation: This module helps users investigate an organization’s susceptibility to exposing information via search engines. It includes:
Website Control Files (Robots.txt and Security.txt analysis)
Search Engine Attack Surface (analysis of potential exposures via search engines)
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: This module identifies Sanctioned and Unsanctioned Cloud Services, Cloud Service Impersonations, and Open Exposed Cloud Buckets. It also identifies SaaS implementations.
Online Sharing Exposure: This module identifies organizational entities within online code-sharing platforms.
Sentiment and Financials: This module provides information on Organizational Related Lawsuits, Layoff Chatter, SEC Filings, SEC Form 8-Ks, and ESG Violations.
Archived Web Pages: This module identifies various archived files and data from an organization's online presence.
Dark Web Presence: This module identifies organizational mentions, Associated Ransomware Events, and Associated Compromised Credentials on the dark web.
Technology Stack: This module identifies the technologies used by the organization.
ThreatNG maintains comprehensive intelligence repositories, including data on the dark web, compromised credentials, ransomware events and groups, known vulnerabilities, ESG violations, bug bounty programs, SEC Form 8-Ks, Bank Identification Numbers, and Mobile Apps (with detailed information on credentials and identifiers found within them).
These repositories provide valuable context and threat intelligence to enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of ThreatNG's assessments.
7. Working with Complementary Solutions:
ThreatNG can enhance and work alongside various security tools, including:
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems: ThreatNG's findings can be fed into SIEM systems to provide a broader context for security events.
SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) platforms: ThreatNG's identified risks and vulnerabilities can trigger automated response workflows in SOAR platforms.
Vulnerability Management tools: ThreatNG's external vulnerability assessments can complement internal vulnerability scanning efforts.
Incident Response platforms: ThreatNG's insights into external threats can aid incident investigation and response.
GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) tools: ThreatNG's security ratings and risk assessments can contribute to an organization's overall GRC posture.
Examples of ThreatNG Helping:
Preventing Phishing Attacks: ThreatNG's Domain Intelligence can identify and alert organizations to potentially malicious domain name permutations, allowing them to take proactive measures to avoid phishing attacks.
Mitigating Data Breaches: ThreatNG's Data Leak Susceptibility assessment can help organizations identify and secure exposed cloud storage or SaaS applications, reducing the risk of data breaches.
Improving Security Posture: ThreatNG's Positive Security Indicators provide a balanced view of an organization's security, highlighting strengths and areas for improvement.
Managing Third-Party Risk: ThreatNG's Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure assessment enables organizations to understand better and manage the security risks associated with their vendors and partners.
ThreatNG offers a robust and comprehensive platform for managing external cyber threats. Its external discovery, assessment, reporting, continuous monitoring, investigation modules, and intelligence repositories empower organizations to proactively identify, understand, and mitigate their external attack surface and digital risks.
