External GRC

In the context of cybersecurity, External GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) is a strategic approach that focuses on assessing and managing an organization's GRC posture from the perspective of an external party, such as a hacker, a third-party auditor, or a regulator. It differs from traditional internal GRC, which relies on an organization's own assessments and data.

The core purpose of External GRC is to gain an objective, unbiased view of an organization's security and compliance health. It's built on the understanding that an organization can be internally compliant but still have significant vulnerabilities exposed to the outside world.

Key Components

• Governance: This involves the external validation of an organization's security policies and oversight structures. It checks if the governance framework is effective in managing external risks. For instance, an External GRC assessment would verify if the company's asset decommissioning policy is being followed by checking if old servers or subdomains have been properly taken offline.

• Risk Management: This is the most active part of the process. It involves external threat intelligence and attack surface mapping to identify, analyze, and prioritize risks that are visible to an outsider. Examples of risks assessed include:

• Exposed Assets: Discovering unknown or "shadow IT" assets like misconfigured cloud storage buckets or old development servers that are publicly accessible.

• Vulnerabilities: Identifying and analyzing publicly known vulnerabilities in software, systems, and configurations that are exposed to the internet.

• Data Leaks: Finding sensitive data, such as credentials, proprietary code, or personal information, that has been unintentionally leaked and is available on the dark web or in public code repositories.

• Compliance: This component verifies an organization's adherence to external regulations and industry standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS) based on an outside-in view. An External GRC assessment would check for compliance violations that an attacker or auditor could easily find. For example, it would look for publicly exposed APIs that handle customer data without proper encryption, a clear violation of many privacy regulations.

In essence, External GRC is a crucial layer of security that complements internal GRC efforts by providing a real-world, adversarial view of an organization's digital posture, helping to prevent breaches and maintain continuous compliance.

ThreatNG is a solution that helps an organization with External GRC by providing a continuous, outside-in evaluation of its security posture. It gives an attacker's-eye view, which allows an organization to identify and manage compliance-related risks that are visible to the public.

External Discovery & Assessment

ThreatNG performs purely external, unauthenticated discovery to map an organization's digital footprint. It identifies a wide range of internet-facing assets without needing internal access or connectors. This process identifies "shadow IT" and other previously overlooked assets that may pose a compliance risk. For example, it might find an old subdomain or a misconfigured cloud instance that is publicly accessible, potentially exposing sensitive data. ThreatNG can perform various external assessments, including:

• Data Leak Susceptibility: This score is based on factors like cloud and SaaS exposure, dark web presence, and compromised credentials. For GRC, this directly relates to compliance with data privacy regulations. For example, ThreatNG might find compromised credentials on the dark web, which is a key indicator of a potential data breach and a GRC issue. * Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This score considers factors like exposed sensitive ports and known vulnerabilities, which are direct risks to GRC compliance. Suppose ThreatNG finds an exposed remote desktop protocol (RDP) port with a known vulnerability. In that case, it's a critical finding because an attacker could use it for a ransomware attack, leading to a breach and a GRC failure.

• Non-Human Identity (NHI) Exposure: This score uncovers an organization's susceptibility to risks associated with non-human identities like API keys and service accounts. For GRC, this is crucial for compliance with frameworks that require proper access controls. For instance, ThreatNG might find an API key exposed in a public code repository, which could be used to breach a system and exfiltrate data, thereby violating data privacy regulations.

External GRC Assessment

ThreatNG's External GRC Assessment is a core capability that continuously evaluates an organization's GRC posture from an external viewpoint. It identifies exposed assets, critical vulnerabilities, and digital risks from the perspective of an unauthenticated attacker and maps these findings directly to relevant GRC frameworks. This helps an organization proactively uncover and address external security and compliance gaps. The platform supports frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and POPIA.

For example, to help with HIPAA compliance, ThreatNG can find an unsecured cloud bucket that contains protected health information (PHI). For GDPR, it could discover misconfigured systems that expose personally identifiable information (PII) to the public internet. Both of these are clear compliance violations that the organization can address immediately, rather than waiting for an audit.

Continuous Monitoring, Reporting, and Investigation Modules

Continuous monitoring is a core component of External GRC, and ThreatNG provides this for an organization's external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings. This ensures that new vulnerabilities or assets are identified in real-time, preventing the kind of security gaps that can emerge between traditional audits. The platform's reporting, including Executive, Technical, and Prioritized reports, provides actionable information needed to drive a continuous GRC process. These reports include a Risk level, Reasoning, and Recommendations to help an organization prioritize and act on findings.

ThreatNG's Investigation Modules are crucial for External GRC, as they enable in-depth analysis of specific risks and threats. The Sensitive Code Exposure module, for example, discovers public code repositories that contain sensitive data like credentials and API keys, which are a significant source of compliance violations. The Search Engine Exploitation module helps users investigate their susceptibility to exposing sensitive information, such as privileged folders or public passwords, via search engines, enabling them to remove this data and proactively mitigate a GRC risk.

Intelligence Repositories & Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG's DarCache intelligence repositories are vital for External GRC because they provide continuously updated threat intelligence. The DarCache Vulnerability repository goes beyond basic CVE information by including EPSS data, which provides a probabilistic estimate of a vulnerability's exploitability, and the KEV catalog, which lists vulnerabilities actively being exploited. This allows an organization to proactively prioritize remediation efforts on vulnerabilities that pose an immediate and proven threat.

ThreatNG's findings can be leveraged in conjunction with complementary solutions to establish a more robust GRC posture. For example, the information ThreatNG collects about external vulnerabilities could be used by an internal vulnerability management platform to get a complete picture of an organization's vulnerabilities—both external and internal. The synergy between these solutions provides a holistic view of the risks. Another example is using ThreatNG's data on exposed sensitive information with a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution. If ThreatNG discovers a publicly exposed database, the DLP system can be configured to prevent similar data from being exfiltrated from the internal network, creating a robust defense against both external and internal data leaks.