Holistic Digital Presence Assessment
Holistic Digital Presence Assessment (HDPA) in the context of cybersecurity is a comprehensive, structured evaluation of an organization's entire digital footprint, extending far beyond the traditional network perimeter. It aims to understand the full scope of an organization's exposure, or attack surface, from the perspective of a motivated external threat actor.
Key Pillars of a Holistic Assessment
The assessment is considered "holistic" because it integrates analysis across three major, interconnected domains to provide a unified risk picture:
1. External Attack Surface Mapping (Technical View)
This pillar focuses on the observable, internet-facing infrastructure and digital assets that an organization owns or controls.
Infrastructure: Identification of all public IP addresses, domains, subdomains, cloud assets (S3 buckets, Azure blobs), DNS records, and internet-exposed services (VPNs, RDP, web servers).
Vulnerability and Configuration: Assessing all discovered assets for known software vulnerabilities, weak configurations, expired certificates, and open ports.
Code and Software: Examining publicly accessible code repositories, open-source dependencies, and API endpoints for security flaws.
2. Digital Identity and Brand Exposure (Human/Data View)
This pillar focuses on how the organization is represented and discussed online, and where its sensitive information may be leaking.
Credential Leakage: Searching the deep and dark web, and paste sites for compromised employee email addresses, passwords, and sensitive internal documents.
Brand Abuse: Monitoring for phishing sites, rogue social media accounts, domain squatting, and counterfeit products that use the organization's brand name to deceive customers or employees.
Employee Information: Assessing the risk posed by employees oversharing information on social media or professional networking sites that could be used for social engineering (doxing).
3. Third-Party and Supply Chain Risk (Dependency View)
This pillar recognizes that an organization's security is only as strong as its weakest partner.
Vendor Exposure: Evaluating the external security posture of critical third-party vendors, suppliers, and partners who have privileged access to the organization's network, data, or systems.
Service Dependencies: Identifying risks associated with external services used by the organization, such as hosting providers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, and cloud environments.
Value and Outcome
The outcome of an HDPA is a single, prioritized view of external risk. It moves beyond passive monitoring to actively correlate findings across these three domains, allowing organizations to:
Identify Shadow IT: Discover unknown or forgotten assets that pose significant risk due to unmonitored and unpatched status.
Contextualize Risk: Prioritize remediation efforts not just on technical severity, but also on the potential business impact of exploiting a specific vulnerability or compromised asset across the entire digital footprint.
ThreatNG is purpose-built to execute a Holistic Digital Presence Assessment (HDPA) by providing the automated, contextual visibility required across all three pillars: external infrastructure, digital identity leakage, and third-party risk. It consolidates scattered digital footprints into a single, prioritized risk score, ensuring the assessment is truly holistic and actionable.
ThreatNG's Contribution to Holistic Assessment
1. External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring (Infrastructure View)
These modules provide comprehensive, continuous mapping of the organization’s owned assets, forming the foundation of the technical assessment pillar.
External Discovery: ThreatNG autonomously maps all internet-facing assets, including often-missed ones like forgotten subdomains, cloud services, and development instances. This ensures a complete view, preventing "Shadow IT" from creating blind spots in the HDPA.
Continuous Monitoring: The platform constantly scans these discovered assets for changes. If an unused S3 bucket is suddenly misconfigured to be public, or an old server’s port is inadvertently opened, ThreatNG flags the change immediately. This ensures the HDPA is not a snapshot but a real-time reflection of the dynamic attack surface.
2. External Assessment and Intelligence Repositories (Technical & Identity View)
These modules transform raw technical findings into contextualized risk, covering the core assessment of vulnerabilities and digital identity leakage.
External Assessment
This provides the technical health context by validating the actual risk posed by discovered assets.
Detailed Examples of External Assessment:
Cloud Misconfiguration Check: ThreatNG finds a public-facing asset linked to a cloud provider. The assessment confirms if the resource (e.g., an Azure blob) contains sensitive environment variables or unencrypted databases. This moves the finding from a simple "public exposure" to a critical, data-leakage risk (Holistic View: Technical + Data).
Supply Chain Hardening: ThreatNG identifies the security headers and configuration of the organization’s primary domain. The assessment finds that the Content Security Policy (CSP) is missing and that a critical third-party analytics script is being loaded. This contextual finding immediately highlights a high-risk vector (XSS via third-party script), directly informing the HDPA's Third-Party Risk pillar.
Intelligence Repositories
These repositories integrate the Digital Identity and Brand Exposure pillar by bringing in the dark web and identity leakage context.
The repositories ingest and categorize data on exposed credentials, stolen documents, and mentions of brand abuse. ThreatNG automatically correlates these external findings with the organization's discovered assets. This is the mechanism for Controlled Dark Web Discovery within the HDPA.
Example: ThreatNG finds a complete list of login credentials for the organization's legacy VPN portal for sale on an illicit forum. It correlates these credentials with the known external-facing VPN server (External Discovery context), giving the finding the highest possible risk score for the HDPA and requiring immediate, prioritized action.
3. Investigation Modules and Reporting
These components are crucial for correlating risks across the three assessment pillars and presenting a single, unambiguous view of the HDPA.
Investigation Modules
These allow analysts to consolidate disparate findings into one holistic view, eliminating the fragmented data that undermines a comprehensive assessment.
Detailed Examples of Investigation Modules in Use:
Risk Correlation: An analyst uses the module to investigate a high-risk score. The module displays: (1) Asset: New, unpatched subdomain (External Discovery), (2) Flaw: Running an outdated, vulnerable service (External Assessment), (3) Threat: The intelligence repository shows an active exploit for that service is being traded by a state-sponsored actor (Intelligence Repositories). This comprehensive contextual view confirms the severity of the findings based on the complete HDPA picture (Technical + Threat + Exposure).
Third-Party Breach Context: An external assessment flags a weak firewall policy for a third-party partner. Simultaneously, the intelligence repository reveals that the third party's credentials were recently leaked. The Investigation Module combines these two seemingly separate findings, generating a single, critical alert: "Imminent access risk due to partner breach," which speeds up mitigation of the Third-Party Risk component of the HDPA.
Reporting
ThreatNG's reports deliver the final, consolidated HDPA score. Instead of separate reports for vulnerabilities, dark web findings, and vendor scores, it presents a single, risk-quantified metric. This allows executives to quickly understand their holistic digital risk and allocate resources based on the business impact.
Examples of ThreatNG Helping:
HDPA Score Improvement: ThreatNG identifies that 80% of the organization’s external risk score comes from unpatched vulnerabilities on five non-critical public-facing servers. The HDPA then focuses remediation efforts exclusively on those five assets, allowing the team to gain the maximum risk reduction for the least effort.
Brand Protection: ThreatNG detects a phishing domain targeting the organization's customers (Intelligence Repository context) and discovers the fraudulent domain is hosted on a compromised server owned by a known shadow IT asset (External Discovery context). ThreatNG immediately triggers the takedown process, leveraging correlated context to establish malicious intent more quickly.
4. Working with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG integrates with other security systems to ensure the intelligence derived from the HDPA is acted on seamlessly across the entire security stack.
Cooperation with Public Relations/Legal Monitoring Tools: ThreatNG integrates its high-confidence dark web and brand-abuse findings (Intelligence Repositories) into external brand-monitoring solutions. This cooperation ensures that any mention of leaked data, fraud, or targeted attacks is instantly elevated for legal review and public communication preparation.
Example: ThreatNG finds a new paste of sensitive data. It integrates with the external monitoring tool to ensure this finding is routed to the legal team immediately, allowing the organization to prepare a statement or response before the data becomes widely publicized.
Cooperation with Asset Management Systems: ThreatNG feeds its continuously updated, high-fidelity asset list (External Discovery) and associated criticality scores to the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This cooperation ensures that all internal and external asset data is unified.
Example: A new cloud instance discovered by ThreatNG is immediately recorded in the CMDB with default tags "External" and "Unsanctioned." This external-to-internal data flow ensures that any subsequent internal tool that queries the CMDB uses the holistic, complete asset inventory.
