Organizational Readiness
In the context of cybersecurity, Organizational Readiness refers to the state of an organization's preparedness to effectively anticipate, prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from cyber threats and incidents. It encompasses a holistic view, extending beyond just technical capabilities to include people, processes, and culture. A truly ready organization can not only mitigate risks but also adapt and evolve in the face of an ever-changing threat landscape.
Here's a detailed breakdown of its key components:
1. Leadership and Governance:
Cybersecurity Strategy and Vision: A clear, well-defined strategy aligned with business objectives, outlining the organization's approach to cybersecurity and its desired future state. This includes a vision for how cybersecurity supports the organization's mission.
Leadership Commitment and Support: Active involvement and strong advocacy from top management (e.g., Board of Directors, C-suite) in prioritizing and funding cybersecurity initiatives. This includes understanding cybersecurity risks at a strategic level.
Governance Framework: Established policies, standards, procedures, and roles/responsibilities that define how cybersecurity is managed throughout the organization. This includes regular reviews and updates.
Risk Management Framework: A structured approach to identify, assess, prioritize, and mitigate cybersecurity risks, integrating risk appetite and tolerance levels set by leadership. This involves continuous monitoring of risk posture.
Compliance and Regulatory Adherence: Understanding and adhering to relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, NIST, ISO 27001) that govern data protection and cybersecurity practices.
2. People and Culture:
Awareness and Training: Comprehensive and ongoing cybersecurity awareness programs for all employees, tailored to different roles and responsibilities. This includes training on phishing, social engineering, data handling, and incident reporting.
Skilled Workforce: Availability of cybersecurity professionals with the necessary expertise (e.g., security architects, incident responders, security analysts) to design, implement, operate, and maintain security controls. This also involves continuous professional development.
Security-Conscious Culture: Fostering a culture where cybersecurity is seen as a shared responsibility, not just an IT function. Employees are encouraged to report suspicious activities and adhere to security policies.
Clear Roles and Responsibilities: Well-defined roles, responsibilities, and accountability for cybersecurity tasks across different departments and individuals.
3. Processes and Procedures:
Incident Response Plan (IRP): A well-documented, tested, and regularly updated plan that outlines the steps to be taken before, during, and after a cybersecurity incident. This includes communication protocols, containment strategies, eradication, recovery, and post-incident analysis.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) Plans: Integrated plans that ensure critical business functions can continue to operate during and after a cyber incident, including data backup and restoration procedures.
Vulnerability Management: Systematic processes for identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities in systems, applications, and networks. This includes regular scanning and penetration testing.
Patch Management: A defined process for the timely application of security patches and updates to all systems and software.
Access Management: Robust processes for managing user identities, authentication, and authorization, ensuring least privilege and segregation of duties.
Change Management: Secure processes for managing changes to IT infrastructure, applications, and configurations to prevent new vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.
Supply Chain Risk Management: Processes to assess and mitigate cybersecurity risks associated with third-party vendors and suppliers who have access to the organization's systems or data.
4. Technology and Controls:
Security Architecture: A well-designed and implemented security architecture that incorporates multiple layers of defense (defense-in-depth) across networks, endpoints, applications, and data.
Security Tools and Solutions: Deployment of appropriate security technologies, such as firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), data loss prevention (DLP), encryption, and identity and access management (IAM) systems.
Network Security: Secure network segmentation, secure remote access solutions, and network monitoring tools.
Endpoint Security: Antivirus/anti-malware, host-based firewalls, and endpoint protection solutions on all devices.
Data Security: Encryption for data at rest and in transit, data classification, and data integrity controls.
Cloud Security: Specific controls and configurations for securing cloud environments and applications, aligning with cloud service provider responsibilities.
Measuring and Improving Organizational Readiness:
Organizational readiness is not a one-time achievement but an ongoing journey. It requires:
Regular Assessments and Audits: Conducting internal and external audits, penetration tests, and vulnerability assessments to identify gaps and weaknesses.
Tabletop Exercises and Simulations: Regularly testing incident response plans through realistic scenarios to identify areas for improvement and ensure team coordination.
Metrics and Reporting: Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track cybersecurity posture, identify trends, and report progress to leadership.
Continuous Improvement: Using lessons learned from incidents, exercises, and assessments to refine and enhance cybersecurity programs and controls.
Organizational readiness in cybersecurity means building a resilient and adaptive defense mechanism that combines robust technology with knowledgeable people and well-defined processes, all guided by strong leadership and a security-aware culture.
ThreatNG, as an all-in-one external attack surface management, digital risk protection, and security ratings solution, offers comprehensive capabilities that directly contribute to an organization's cybersecurity readiness.
Here's how ThreatNG helps, with detailed examples of its features:
External Discovery
ThreatNG excels at performing purely external, unauthenticated discovery without requiring any connectors. This means it can identify an organization's publicly exposed assets and digital footprint from the perspective of an attacker. For example, it automatically uncovers:
Subdomains and associated DNS records: ThreatNG can map out all known subdomains, including those that might be vulnerable to takeover, providing a complete picture of an organization's web presence.
Web applications: It identifies web applications accessible from the outside world, analyzing them for potential entry points.
Mobile applications: ThreatNG identifies an organization's mobile apps across various marketplaces and analyzes their content for exposed credentials or identifiers.
Code repositories: It can uncover public code repositories and identify sensitive data exposure within them.
Cloud and SaaS services: ThreatNG identifies both sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions in use, including open, exposed cloud buckets. This is crucial for understanding shadow IT and misconfigurations.
Publicly exposed IoT/OT devices, databases, and remote access services: ThreatNG identifies exposed sensitive ports, private IPs, and known vulnerabilities, allowing an organization to see what an attacker sees.
External Assessment
ThreatNG performs a wide range of external assessments to evaluate various aspects of an organization's digital risk:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: ThreatNG analyzes parts of a web application accessible from the outside world to identify potential entry points for attackers. For instance, if an organization has a publicly accessible web application with outdated libraries, ThreatNG would flag this as a possible vulnerability to hijacking.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: This evaluation assesses a website's susceptibility by analyzing its subdomains, DNS records, and SSL certificate statuses. An example would be if an organization had a CNAME record pointing to an expired service, ThreatNG would identify this as a subdomain takeover risk.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This assessment is derived from factors such as domain intelligence (including domain name permutations and Web3 domains), email intelligence (email security presence and format prediction), and dark web presence (including compromised credentials). ThreatNG may find that an organization's DMARC, SPF, or DKIM records are not properly configured, thereby increasing its susceptibility to Business Email Compromise (BEC) and phishing attacks. It can also identify compromised credentials for the organization on the dark web.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: This considers attack surface intelligence, digital risk intelligence, ESG violations, sentiment and financials (lawsuits, SEC filings, negative news), and domain intelligence. If ThreatNG identifies numerous negative news articles related to data breaches or discovers ESG violations associated with the organization, it contributes to a higher brand damage susceptibility score.
Data Leak Susceptibility: Derived from cloud and SaaS exposure, dark web presence (compromised credentials), and domain intelligence. For example, ThreatNG might identify an open Amazon S3 bucket exposing sensitive data, or it could detect compromised credentials linked to the organization on the dark web, indicating a high susceptibility to data leaks.
Cyber Risk Exposure: This score considers certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, sensitive ports, and code secret exposure. If an organization has unpatched critical vulnerabilities on publicly accessible servers or sensitive API keys exposed in public code repositories, ThreatNG would highlight this as significant cyber risk exposure.
ESG Exposure: ThreatNG rates an organization based on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) violations it discovers through its external intelligence findings. It analyzes areas such as Competition, Consumer, Employment, and Safety-related offenses. For instance, if public records or news indicate an organization has been fined for environmental non-compliance, this would factor into its ESG exposure.
Supply Chain & Third-Party Exposure: This is derived from domain intelligence (enumeration of vendor technologies from DNS and subdomains), technology stack, and cloud and SaaS exposure. ThreatNG can identify if an organization is using a vulnerable version of a third-party software as part of its technology stack or if a key vendor has exposed cloud services.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: Calculated based on exposed sensitive ports, private IPs, known vulnerabilities, compromised credentials, and ransomware events/gang activity found on the dark web. If ThreatNG detects an organization's credentials on a ransomware gang's leak site, or identifies open RDP ports with known vulnerabilities, this directly increases their breach and ransomware susceptibility score.
Mobile App Exposure: ThreatNG evaluates the exposure of an organization’s mobile apps by discovering them in marketplaces and analyzing their content for access credentials (such as AWS Access Key IDs, API Keys, or Facebook Access Tokens), security credentials (like private keys), and platform-specific identifiers. For example, if a mobile app published by the organization contains hardcoded API keys or sensitive user information, ThreatNG will flag this.
Positive Security Indicators: This feature highlights an organization's security strengths by detecting the presence of beneficial security controls, such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) or multi-factor authentication (MFA). ThreatNG validates these positive measures from the perspective of an external attacker, providing objective evidence of their effectiveness. This offers a more balanced view of security posture. For instance, ThreatNG would identify if a WAF is actively protecting a web application or if MFA is enforced on public-facing login portals.
External GRC Assessment: ThreatNG provides a continuous, outside-in evaluation of an organization's Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) posture. 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 (e.g., PCI DSS). This helps organizations proactively uncover and address external security and compliance gaps. For example, if an organization has unpatched systems with vulnerabilities that are directly tied to a PCI DSS requirement for secure configurations, ThreatNG would highlight this GRC gap.
External Threat Alignment: ThreatNG aligns an organization's security posture with external threats by performing unauthenticated, outside-in discovery and assessment of its attack surface, identifying vulnerabilities and exposures in a manner that an attacker would. Its assessments directly map to MITRE ATT&CK techniques, revealing how an adversary might achieve initial access or establish persistence. For instance, if ThreatNG identifies an exposed RDP service with weak credentials, it may map this to a MITRE ATT&CK technique, such as "T1076 Remote Services."
Reporting
ThreatNG provides diverse reporting capabilities to cater to different stakeholders:
Executive Reports: High-level summaries for leadership, focusing on overall security posture, key risks, and strategic recommendations.
Technical Reports: Detailed findings for security teams, including specific vulnerabilities, their locations, and technical remediation steps.
Prioritized Reports: Categorization of risks into High, Medium, Low, and Informational to help organizations prioritize their security efforts.
Security Ratings Reports: A comprehensive overview of the organization's security score, which can be tracked over time.
Inventory Reports: A clear listing of all discovered external assets.
Ransomware Susceptibility Reports: Specific insights into an organization's likelihood of being targeted by ransomware.
U.S. SEC Filings and External GRC Assessment Mappings:
Reports that link identified risks to public financial disclosures and relevant GRC frameworks, such as PCI DSS.
Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG continuously monitors an organization's external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings. This ensures that as new assets come online, configurations change, or new vulnerabilities emerge, the organization's security posture is constantly evaluated and updated. For example, if a new subdomain is provisioned with a misconfigured web server, ThreatNG's continuous monitoring would quickly detect and flag this.
Investigation Modules
ThreatNG offers powerful investigation modules to drill down into discovery and assessment results:
Domain Intelligence:
Domain Overview: Provides insights like digital presence word clouds, Microsoft Entra identification, related Bug Bounty Programs, and SwaggerHub instances for API documentation. This helps an organization understand its digital footprint and potential API exposure.
DNS Intelligence: Analyzes domain records, identifies IP addresses, vendors, and technologies. It also identifies taken and available domain name permutations, as well as Web3 domains. For example, if a new, seemingly legitimate domain closely resembling the organization's actual domain appears as "available," it could indicate a potential typosquatting or phishing attempt that ThreatNG can flag.
Email Intelligence: Determines email security presence (DMARC, SPF, DKIM records), predicts email formats, and identifies harvested emails. ThreatNG can show if an organization's email authentication records are strong or weak, which directly impacts phishing defense.
WHOIS Intelligence: Provides WHOIS analysis and identifies other domains owned by the same entity. This helps uncover related digital assets that might not be immediately obvious.
Subdomain Intelligence: Analyzes HTTP responses, header analysis (security and deprecated headers), server technologies, cloud hosting, website builders, e-commerce platforms, CMS, and more. It also identifies subdomain takeover susceptibility and content, such as admin pages, APIs, development environments, and VPNs. For instance, ThreatNG might discover an exposed Jira instance (a Project Management tool ) on a subdomain, providing insights into potential access for attackers.
Ports: Identifies exposed IoT/OT services (such as FTP, Telnet, and VoIP), Industrial Control Systems (ICS), databases (including SQL Server and MySQL), and remote access services (SSH and RDP). This is critical for understanding direct attack vectors.
Known Vulnerabilities: ThreatNG highlights known vulnerabilities associated with discovered assets and services.
Web Application Firewall Discovery and Vendor Types: Identifies the presence and type of WAFs protecting web applications.
IP Intelligence: Provides information on IP addresses, shared IPs, ASNs, country locations, and private IPs. This helps in understanding the network footprint and potential shared hosting risks.
Certificate Intelligence: Analyzes TLS certificates, including their status, issuers, and associated organizations. It can identify expired certificates or certificates without subdomains, which can be security risks.
Social Media: Tracks posts from the organization on social media, breaking out content copy, hashtags, links, and tags. This can help identify brand mentions, sentiment, and potential social engineering risks.
Sensitive Code Exposure: Discovers public code repositories and uncovers digital risks within them, including exposed access credentials (API keys, access tokens, generic credentials), cloud credentials (AWS keys), security credentials (private keys), and various configuration files (application, system, and network). For example, ThreatNG might find a GitHub repository containing an AWS access key ID, which an attacker could use to compromise cloud resources.
Mobile Application Discovery: Discovers mobile apps related to the organization in marketplaces and analyzes their content for access credentials, security credentials, and platform-specific identifiers.
Search Engine Exploitation:
Website Control Files: Discovers
robots.txtandsecurity.txtfiles, revealing information like secure directories, email addresses, admin directories, or bug bounty program listings.Search Engine Attack Surface: Helps investigate an organization's susceptibility to exposing errors, sensitive information, public passwords, or susceptible files via search engines. For example, if an organization has misconfigured web servers that expose directory listings to search engines, ThreatNG would highlight this.
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: Identifies sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services, cloud service impersonations, and open exposed cloud buckets across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It also identifies SaaS implementations, such as Salesforce (CRM), Slack (Communication and Collaboration), Splunk (Data Analytics and Observability), Okta (Identity and Access Management), and Zoom (Video Conferencing), associated with the organization. ThreatNG can identify if an organization has an unsanctioned Dropbox account being used for business data or if an AWS S3 bucket is publicly accessible.
Online Sharing Exposure: Identifies the organization's presence on online code-sharing platforms, such as Pastebin, GitHub Gist, Scribd, and SlideShare, where sensitive information may be inadvertently shared.
Sentiment and Financials: Identifies organization-related lawsuits, layoff chatter, SEC filings of publicly traded US companies (especially risk and oversight disclosures), SEC Form 8-Ks, and ESG violations.
Archived Web Pages: Discovers archived content on the organization’s online presence, including APIs, document files, emails, login pages, and directories. This can reveal historical vulnerabilities or exposed information.
Dark Web Presence: Identifies organizational mentions, associated ransomware events, and compromised credentials found on the dark web. This provides direct evidence of real-world threats and compromised data.
Technology Stack: Identifies the technologies used by the organization, including web servers, operating systems, databases, CRM systems, and security tools. This helps in understanding the software landscape and associated vulnerabilities.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
ThreatNG maintains continuously updated intelligence repositories, branded as DarCache, providing critical context for identified risks:
Dark Web (DarCache Dark Web): Contains information from the dark web relevant to the organization.
Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): A repository of compromised credentials that ThreatNG checks against discovered organizational assets.
Ransomware Groups and Activities (DarCache Ransomware): Tracks over 70 ransomware gangs and their activities, providing insights into potential threats.
Vulnerabilities (DarCache Vulnerability): Provides a comprehensive approach to managing external risks by considering the real-world exploitability, likelihood of exploitation, and potential impact.
NVD (DarCache NVD): Provides detailed information on attack complexity, interaction, vector, impact scores (Availability, Confidentiality, Integrity), CVSS Score, and Severity. This helps in a deep understanding of the technical characteristics of each vulnerability.
EPSS (DarCache EPSS): Provides a probabilistic estimate of the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited shortly. Combining EPSS with other data allows for a more forward-looking prioritization of vulnerabilities.
KEV (DarCache KEV): Lists vulnerabilities actively being exploited in the wild, providing critical context for prioritizing remediation efforts.
Verified Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Exploits (DarCache eXploit): Provides direct links to PoC exploits on platforms like GitHub, referenced by CVEs. This information is invaluable for security teams to reproduce the vulnerability, assess its real-world impact, and develop effective mitigation strategies.
ESG Violations (DarCache ESG): Tracks discovered environmental, social, and governance violations.
Bug Bounty Programs (DarCache Bug Bounty): Lists in-scope and out-of-scope assets for bug bounty programs.
SEC Form 8-Ks (DarCache 8-K): Provides access to SEC Form 8-Ks for publicly traded US companies, which often contain disclosures about cybersecurity incidents or risks.
Mobile Apps (DarCache Mobile): Indicates the presence of access credentials, security credentials, and platform-specific identifiers within mobile apps.
Complementary Solutions
While ThreatNG is a comprehensive solution, it can synergize effectively with other cybersecurity tools to further enhance an organization's readiness:
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) / Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms: ThreatNG's external threat intelligence and identified vulnerabilities can be fed into a SIEM/SOAR platform. This allows for correlation of external risks with internal log data, providing a more complete picture of an ongoing attack or potential compromise. For example, if ThreatNG identifies a newly exposed critical vulnerability on an external-facing server, the SIEM could be configured to alert on any suspicious activity originating from that server's IP address. A SOAR platform could then automatically initiate a vulnerability scan or block traffic from known malicious IPs identified by ThreatNG.
Vulnerability Management Solutions: ThreatNG's external vulnerability identification, especially its integration with NVD, EPSS, and KEV, can complement internal vulnerability scanners. The external perspective from ThreatNG can help prioritize remediation efforts for vulnerabilities that are both internally detected and externally exploitable or actively exploited in the wild. For example, if an internal scanner identifies a broad range of vulnerabilities, ThreatNG's KEV data can help the team focus on the ones that pose an immediate and proven threat from an external perspective.
Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs): ThreatNG's DarCache repositories (Dark Web, Compromised Credentials, Ransomware Groups) can enrich a TIP. This allows an organization to consolidate all threat intelligence, enabling broader analysis and proactive defense. For instance, if ThreatNG uncovers new compromised credentials for the organization on the dark web, this data can be ingested by a TIP and used to automatically trigger password resets or multi-factor authentication requirements for affected users.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) / Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Solutions: While ThreatNG focuses on the external attack surface, EDR/XDR solutions provide deep visibility into internal endpoints and networks. When ThreatNG identifies a high-risk external exposure (e.g., a specific type of malware family targeting a known vulnerability), this intelligence can inform EDR/XDR rules to proactively detect and block related activity on internal systems. For example, if ThreatNG detects a phishing campaign targeting the organization based on domain intelligence, the EDR could be configured to monitor for specific file hashes or network connections associated with that campaign.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Platforms: ThreatNG's External GRC Assessment capabilities, including its mapping to frameworks like PCI DSS, can directly integrate with a dedicated GRC platform. This provides continuous, real-time external risk posture updates to the GRC team, streamlining compliance reporting and risk management processes. For instance, an organization using a GRC platform to track their PCI DSS compliance can have ThreatNG automatically feed in findings related to exposed assets or vulnerabilities that directly impact PCI DSS requirements, providing ongoing evidence of compliance or non-compliance.
Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) Tools: In the event of an incident, the detailed external attack surface and digital risk intelligence provided by ThreatNG can be invaluable for DFIR teams. Information on exposed services, sensitive code, and dark web presence can help incident responders quickly understand potential entry points and the scope of a breach. For example, if a breach occurs, the DFIR team can use ThreatNG's advanced search capabilities to quickly investigate the external exposure of the compromised system, identifying any known vulnerabilities or sensitive data that might have facilitated the attack.
By combining ThreatNG's robust external discovery, assessment, and intelligence with the internal visibility and response capabilities of complementary solutions, organizations can achieve a truly holistic and resilient cybersecurity posture.
