External Exposure Contextualization
External Exposure Contextualization is a crucial process in cybersecurity that goes beyond simply identifying an organization's externally facing digital assets. It involves gathering and analyzing information to understand each asset's business significance, potential vulnerabilities, and risks.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Key Elements:
Asset Identification: The first step is to discover all the organization's assets accessible from the internet or other external networks. This includes websites, applications, servers, cloud services, APIs, and more.
Business Function: Contextualization determines the purpose and role of each asset within the organization's operations. For example:
Is it an e-commerce website that generates revenue?
Is it a customer portal that handles sensitive data?
Is it a development server that should not be publicly accessible?
Data Sensitivity: It assesses the type of data handled by the asset.
Does it process personally identifiable information (PII)?
Does it store financial records or intellectual property?
The sensitivity of the data greatly influences the potential impact of a security breach.
Vulnerability Assessment: Contextualization includes identifying potential weaknesses in the asset that attackers could exploit.
Are there known software vulnerabilities?
Are there misconfigurations that expose sensitive information?
Are there weak authentication mechanisms?
Attacker's Perspective: It considers how attractive the asset might be to an attacker and their potential motivations.
Is it a high-profile target?
Does it offer a potential entry point into the organization's internal network?
Interconnections: Contextualization maps the relationships between different assets.
How does this web application interact with other systems?
What data flows between them?
Understanding these connections helps identify potential attack paths.
Benefits:
Accurate Risk Prioritization: Security teams can effectively prioritize remediation efforts by understanding the business criticality and potential impact of a compromise.
Efficient Resource Allocation: Security resources can be focused on protecting the most critical and vulnerable assets.
Improved Incident Response: Contextual information helps security teams quickly assess the scope and impact of a security incident.
Proactive Security: Contextualization enables organizations to identify and address weaknesses proactively before attackers can exploit them.
External Exposure Contextualization transforms a simple list of assets into a rich intelligence source that empowers organizations to make informed decisions about their security posture.
ThreatNG is a powerful platform designed to provide organizations with a comprehensive understanding of their external security posture. It achieves this through a combination of several key capabilities:
ThreatNG's strength starts with its external discovery. It uses a "seedless" approach and can perform purely external unauthenticated discovery using only a domain and organization name.
This is a significant advantage because it eliminates the need for you to have a pre-existing inventory of all your external assets. ThreatNG automatically maps your external footprint, discovering assets you might not know about.
ThreatNG provides detailed external assessments to pinpoint potential vulnerabilities:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: ThreatNG analyzes your web applications to find weaknesses that could allow attackers to take control.
For example, it assesses login pages for vulnerability to credential stuffing and checks for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities by analyzing the parts of a web application accessible from the outside world to identify potential entry points for attackers.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: It assesses the risk of attackers taking over your subdomains.
This involves comprehensively analyzing your website's subdomains, DNS records, and SSL certificate statuses.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: ThreatNG evaluates your vulnerability to Business Email Compromise (BEC) and phishing attacks.
It considers factors like sentiment, financial data, the risk of domain impersonation (using Domain Intelligence), and compromised credentials on the dark web.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: ThreatNG assesses the risk to your brand's reputation.
It analyzes various factors, including your attack surface, digital risk, ESG violations, public sentiment, and the potential for domain impersonation.
Data Leak Susceptibility: ThreatNG evaluates your risk of data leaks.
It examines your cloud and SaaS exposure, dark web presence (for compromised credentials), domain intelligence, and financial/legal disclosures.
Cyber Risk Exposure: ThreatNG calculates your overall cyber risk.
This includes analyzing parameters our Domain Intelligence module covers, including certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, and sensitive ports, to determine cyber risk exposure. It also factors in code secret exposure, cloud and SaaS Exposure, and compromised credentials on the dark web.
ESG Exposure: ThreatNG assesses your vulnerability to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) risks.
It analyzes media coverage sentiment and financial findings to highlight Competition, Consumer, Employment, Environment, Financial, Government Contracting, Healthcare, and Safety-related offenses.
Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure: ThreatNG helps you understand risks from your vendors.
It identifies the vendor technologies and assesses your cloud and SaaS exposure.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: ThreatNG evaluates your likelihood of experiencing a data breach or ransomware attack.
It considers your attack surface, dark web activity (ransomware events, gang activity, and compromised credentials), and financial disclosures (SEC Form 8-Ks).
Mobile App Exposure: ThreatNG analyzes your mobile apps for security issues.
It discovers your apps in marketplaces and examines them for exposed credentials, security keys, and platform-specific identifiers.
Positive Security Indicators: Importantly, ThreatNG also identifies and highlights your security strengths, such as the presence of Web Application Firewalls or multi-factor authentication.
ThreatNG delivers a variety of reports to meet different needs:
Executive summaries
Technical reports
Prioritized risk lists
Security ratings
Inventory reports
Ransomware susceptibility reports
SEC filings analysis
These reports are enhanced with a built-in knowledge base that provides:
Risk levels for prioritization
Reasoning behind the findings
Recommendations for remediation
Links to further information
ThreatNG continuously monitors your external attack surface, digital risks, and security ratings, providing ongoing awareness of your security posture.
ThreatNG's investigation modules provide robust solutions for in-depth analysis:
Domain Intelligence: This module offers a wealth of information about your domains:
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 (extensive details about subdomains, technologies used)
IP Intelligence (IP information)
Certificate Intelligence (TLS Certificates and Associated Organizations)
Social Media (organization's posts)
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module discovers public code repositories and identifies exposed credentials, API keys, and other secrets.
For example, it can find hardcoded AWS credentials in a GitHub repository.
Mobile Application Discovery: This module discovers your mobile apps in marketplaces and analyzes them for security vulnerabilities.
For instance, it can detect hardcoded API keys within a mobile app.
Search Engine Exploitation: This module helps you assess how easily information can be exposed via search engines by discovering Website Control Files (Robots.txt and Security.txt) and Search Engine Attack Surface.
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: This module identifies your sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services, potential cloud service impersonations, and SaaS implementations.
Online Sharing Exposure: This module identifies your presence within online Code-Sharing Platforms.
Sentiment and Financials: This module provides information on organizational lawsuits, layoff chatter, SEC Filings, and ESG Violations.
Archived Web Pages: This module identifies various archived files and data related to the organization's online presence.
Dark Web Presence: This module tracks organizational mentions on the dark web and associated ransomware events and compromised credentials.
Technology Stack: This module identifies the technologies used by your organization.
ThreatNG uses a wealth of intelligence repositories to enrich its analysis:
Dark web data
Compromised credentials
Ransomware information
Vulnerability data
ESG violation records
Bug bounty programs
SEC filings
Mobile app data
Working with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG integrates with other security tools to enhance your overall security posture:
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems: You can feed ThreatNG's findings into your SIEM to correlate external risks with internal events.
For example, if ThreatNG detects compromised credentials, your SIEM can monitor for suspicious logins.
Vulnerability Management Tools: ThreatNG's external vulnerability assessments complement internal scanning.
For example, ThreatNG might identify an exposed web application, and your vulnerability scanner can then perform a deeper analysis.
SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) Platforms: You can use ThreatNG's data to automate security responses.
For instance, if ThreatNG detects a potential phishing domain, your SOAR platform can block it.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) Systems: Integrate ThreatNG's compromised credential detection to trigger actions like password resets.
By providing comprehensive external visibility, detailed risk assessments, and seamless integration, ThreatNG is a valuable solution for proactive security management.
