Human Attack Surface
The Human Attack Surface is the totality of vulnerabilities and potential entry points within an organization's people, processes, and communication channels that adversaries can exploit to gain unauthorized access, commit fraud, or cause disruption.
The human element is considered the weakest link and extends beyond technical flaws to encompass psychological and behavioral susceptibilities.
Key Components of the Human Attack Surface
Social Engineering Susceptibility: The exploitation of human trust, urgency, fear, or helpfulness through deceptive communication. Attack vectors include:
Phishing/Spear-Phishing: Emails crafted to steal credentials or deliver malware.
Vishing/Smishing: Attacks conducted via voice calls (impersonating executives or IT support) or SMS messages, leveraging high-trust channels.
Deepfakes/Synthetic Identity: The use of generative AI to create hyper-realistic voice clones or video impersonations of trusted figures, bypassing biometric or visual verification.
Credential Management & Hygiene: This involves vulnerabilities created by user actions, which often provide the initial access attackers need to pivot.
Password Reuse/Weak Passwords: Easily guessable credentials that simplify brute-force or credential stuffing attacks.
Shadow Identity Creation: Employees creating unmonitored accounts or cloud instances outside of IT governance.
Secret Sprawl: Inadvertently sharing sensitive information (passwords, PII, internal project details) via unsecured channels, social media, or public forums.
Process & Policy Failure: This involves gaps in operational procedures that attackers can exploit after reconnaissance.
Help Desk/Support Abuse: Attackers impersonating employees or vendors to trick support staff into resetting passwords or granting elevated access.
Lack of Verification: Failure by employees (particularly in finance or HR) to follow multi-step verification protocols (like call-backs) for large wire transfers or sensitive data requests.
Alert Fatigue: The overwhelming volume of security alerts causes human staff to ignore or dismiss genuine signs of intrusion, which attackers then exploit with stealthy or low-level techniques.
Managing the Human Attack Surface requires continuous training, but, more critically, deploying technical controls and external monitoring to neutralize the threat infrastructure (fake domains, exposed credentials) before the attack reaches the vulnerable human target.
The Human Attack Surface is the totality of vulnerabilities in an organization's people, processes, and communications that attackers exploit. ThreatNG helps organizations neutralize this external risk by shifting defense away from relying on human judgment toward continuous technical validation of the attacker’s infrastructure and reconnaissance data.
ThreatNG's Strategy for Securing the Human Attack Surface
ThreatNG leverages its core capabilities to get ahead of attacks (such as phishing, vishing, and social engineering) targeting employees, ensuring the attack infrastructure is disarmed before the message is ever sent.
1. External Discovery and Identifying Human Targets:
ThreatNG’s External Discovery performs purely external unauthenticated reconnaissance to find the exact assets and identities attackers need for successful social engineering.
Actionable Insight: The Social Media Investigation Module is critical here. It uses the Username Exposure Module to find exposed employee names and high-value, role-based emails (e.g.,
admin@,support@) that an adversary uses to craft a convincing impersonation or spear-phishing attack.Adversary Focus: By mapping the organization’s exposed Technology Stack (e.g., CRM and Project Management platforms), ThreatNG reveals systems that employees commonly access, helping the attacker target credentials.
2. Detailed External Assessment of Vulnerabilities:
ThreatNG assesses the psychological and technical weaknesses attackers leverage:
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This assessment directly quantifies the organization's vulnerability to human exploitation. It analyzes external data (such as domain impersonation and credential leaks) to estimate the likelihood of a successful phishing campaign.
Data Leak Susceptibility (Securing Credentials): Since credential theft fuels lateral movement, this capability proactively monitors the Dark Web for exposed PII and compromised credentials. This intelligence allows the organization to preemptively disable accounts that could be used in vishing or login attacks.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: This protects against the reputational fallout of a widespread social engineering campaign. It analyzes news sentiment and public scrutiny triggered when customers are tricked by a brand impersonation attack.
3. Investigation Modules and Disarming Attack Infrastructure:
The Investigation Modules provide the technical intelligence to neutralize the threats:
Domain Intelligence: This module is crucial for neutralizing the fraudulent infrastructure used in phishing. It discovers typosquatted and look-alike domains that attackers use for landing pages, enabling teams to block the malicious site proactively at the DNS level.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This addresses the risk of Secret Sprawl. It hunts for exposed hardcoded credentials, API keys, and configuration files in public code repositories, eliminating the credentials that an adversary would use to bypass MFA and move laterally after a low-level phishing compromise.
4. Cooperation with Complementary Solutions:
ThreatNG's external intelligence provides the critical context that enhances internal defensive layers:
Security Awareness Training (SAT) Platforms: ThreatNG's Username Exposure data and Domain Intelligence (e.g., fraudulent domains) can be used to fuel the SAT platform. This allows the organization to tailor phishing simulations and training materials to the exact external threats and exposed employees identified by ThreatNG, making training far more realistic and practical.
Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR) Solutions: If ThreatNG detects an employee's compromised credentials on the Dark Web, that intelligence can be sent to the ITDR solution. The ITDR can immediately monitor authentication logs for attempts using that specific credential, forcing a mandatory password reset or locking the account at the very first sign of use.
Network Detection and Response (NDR) Solutions: ThreatNG’s data on exposed administrative tools (via Technology Stack) and vulnerabilities can be used by an NDR solution to monitor internal traffic. If the NDR solution detects a lateral movement attempt using that known-vulnerable administrative protocol, the external intelligence provides high-confidence context to block the session immediately.
