Proactive Threat Prevention
Proactive threat prevention is a cybersecurity strategy that aims to identify, anticipate, and stop cyberattacks before they can occur. This approach contrasts with a reactive one, which focuses on responding to an attack after a breach has already happened. While both are essential parts of a comprehensive security plan, a proactive stance helps reduce risk, minimize damage, and improve an organization’s overall security posture.
Key Components
Proactive threat prevention is built on a few core components:
Vulnerability Management: This involves systematically identifying, assessing, and remediating security weaknesses in systems and applications. It is a continuous process that includes regular vulnerability scanning and timely patch management to fix known flaws.
Threat Intelligence: This is the collection and analysis of data about current and emerging threats, including the tactics, techniques, and motivations of attackers. By understanding the threat landscape, an organization can better anticipate and defend against potential attacks.
Continuous Monitoring: This involves utilizing tools such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to monitor network traffic, user behavior, and system logs in real-time. This helps to detect unusual activity or anomalies that could indicate a developing threat.
Attack Surface Management: This is the process of continuously identifying and inventorying all of an organization's internet-facing assets and potential entry points that an attacker could use to gain access. This helps to eliminate "blind spots" and reduce the overall attack surface.
Proactive Defenses: This includes a variety of offensive security practices, such as penetration testing and threat hunting. Penetration testing involves ethical hackers attempting to breach a system to find vulnerabilities, while threat hunting is a proactive search for hidden threats that may have bypassed a network's defenses.
ThreatNG helps organizations with proactive threat prevention by providing an external, attacker-centric view of their digital assets and associated risks. It enables an organization to identify, assess, and mitigate vulnerabilities and threats before they are exploited in an attack.
ThreatNG’s external discovery capabilities are the foundation of its proactive approach. It performs unauthenticated, purely external reconnaissance, which means it finds an organization’s internet-facing assets in the same way an attacker would, without any internal credentials or connectors. This process uncovers all digital assets, including those that an organization may have forgotten or be unaware of, such as forgotten subdomains, misconfigured cloud buckets, and exposed development environments. By identifying these "blind spots," ThreatNG enables an organization to reduce its overall attack surface and address potential entry points before they can be exploited.
For example, a company might have a forgotten subdomain, such as old-blog.company.com, that's still online and running outdated software with a known vulnerability. ThreatNG would identify this asset and its associated risks, enabling the company to remediate the issue proactively before an attacker discovers it.
ThreatNG’s external assessment capabilities transform the raw data from discovery into actionable, contextualized insights. It generates a variety of susceptibility scores and risk ratings that help an organization understand its exposure to specific threats.
Cyber Risk Exposure: This score considers parameters such as exposed certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, and sensitive ports to determine an organization’s overall cyber risk exposure. ThreatNG could identify an exposed sensitive port, such as a database server (e.g., MySQL or PostgreSQL), which would increase the cyber risk exposure score.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This assessment is based on an organization’s external attack surface and digital risk intelligence, including exposed sensitive ports, known vulnerabilities, compromised credentials on the dark web, and ransomware gang activity. Suppose ThreatNG identifies an open Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) port on a publicly facing server, and its intelligence repositories indicate that a specific ransomware group actively targets RDP for initial access. In that case, the system assigns a high susceptibility rating, enabling the security team to act proactively.
Positive Security Indicators: This feature is unique to proactive defense, as it identifies and highlights an organization's security strengths. ThreatNG seeks out beneficial security controls, such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) or multi-factor authentication, and validates their effectiveness from the perspective of an external attacker. This provides a more balanced view, helping an organization identify what is working well in its security posture.
ThreatNG's reporting capabilities are designed to make its contextualized intelligence actionable for different audiences. The Prioritized Report is a key feature for proactive threat prevention, as it categorizes findings into high, medium, low, and informational risk levels. This enables security teams to concentrate their resources on the most critical risks that require immediate attention, such as known vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited in the wild. Technical Reports also provide detailed reasoning and recommendations, giving security teams the information they need to remediate an issue quickly.
ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of an organization’s external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings. This is essential for a proactive approach because an organization’s external attack surface is constantly changing due to new deployments or updates. Continuous monitoring ensures that as new vulnerabilities emerge or an organization's digital footprint changes, the platform immediately detects the latest risks and updates its assessment, enabling a timely and proactive response.
ThreatNG’s investigation modules allow for a deep dive into findings, providing the necessary context to prevent threats.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module scans public code repositories for exposed sensitive data, including API keys, cloud credentials, and private SSH keys. For instance, if an employee accidentally hardcoded an AWS Access Key ID into a public GitHub repository, ThreatNG would find it. This proactive detection allows an organization to revoke the key before an attacker can use it to gain unauthorized access.
Search Engine Exploitation: This module assesses an organization’s susceptibility to information leakage via search engines. ThreatNG can identify exposed administrative directories, privileged folders, or public passwords that have been indexed by a search engine, providing a direct entry point for an attacker.
Dark Web Presence: This module monitors for an organization’s mentions on the dark web, including compromised credentials and ransomware events. Suppose ThreatNG finds a list of compromised employee credentials for sale. In that case, it allows the organization to force password resets and take other protective measures before those credentials are used in a malicious attack.
ThreatNG’s continuously updated intelligence repositories, branded as DarCache, enable the platform to be truly proactive.
DarCache Vulnerability: This repository provides a holistic and proactive approach to managing external risks and vulnerabilities. It contains data from multiple sources, including the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), and a list of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV). By combining these, ThreatNG can determine not only the severity of a vulnerability but also the likelihood and proven real-world exploitability, which is vital for prioritizing remediation efforts.
DarCache Ransomware: This repository tracks over 70 ransomware gangs and their activities. ThreatNG can utilize this data to determine if a discovered vulnerability is a known entry point for a specific ransomware gang, enabling the organization to prioritize mitigation efforts on threats that are most relevant to them.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external-facing proactive capabilities can be enhanced by working with other cybersecurity solutions that provide internal visibility.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems: ThreatNG can feed its external intelligence into a SIEM. Suppose ThreatNG flags a publicly exposed administrative page. In that case, the SIEM can correlate this external finding with internal login logs to see if there have been any unauthorized login attempts, providing a unified view of the threat.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platforms: ThreatNG can provide external context to an XDR platform, enabling it to take automated response actions. For example, suppose ThreatNG identifies compromised credentials on the dark web. In that case, the XDR platform can automatically block access for those accounts and force a password reset, preventing a potential account takeover. This synergy enables a faster and more comprehensive response.
