Public Information Blind Spot

The Public Information Blind Spot in the context of cybersecurity is a critical failure in an organization's risk management strategy where it overlooks or underestimates the significant security threats posed by data and intelligence that are publicly available or externally exposed. This blind spot exists because security efforts are often overwhelmingly focused on internal network defense, firewall logs, and authenticated system access, while ignoring the information readily accessible to any unauthenticated attacker on the open internet, deep web, and social media.

Scope and Sources of the Blind Spot

This blind spot encompasses all information that an attacker can gather about an organization without ever launching a direct attack or requiring credentials, constituting the initial and most crucial phase of reconnaissance.

1. Digital Footprint Exposures

These are exposures residing on the organization's own digital assets but viewed from the outside:

• Forgotten Assets: Unknown or shadow IT assets, legacy testing subdomains, or misconfigured cloud buckets that are publicly exposed.

• Misconfigurations: Exposed software version numbers, open database ports, or missing critical security headers (like HSTS) that reveal vulnerabilities.

• Sensitive Code Leaks: Proprietary code, API keys, or hard-coded credentials accidentally published in public code repositories or online sharing sites.

2. Brand and Human Exposures

These are exposures related to the people and brand that enable social engineering:

• Impersonation Infrastructure: The existence of lookalike domains, typo-squatting sites, or blockchain domains that attackers can use to spoof the brand and launch phishing campaigns.

• Employee Data: Excessive public exposure of employee titles, emails, and roles, particularly in high-value departments (finance, IT, security), which facilitates Business Email Compromise (BEC) and spear-phishing.

• Adverse Media: Publicly available lawsuits, regulatory filings, or negative news that can be used as highly credible pretexts in social engineering attacks (e.g., the BEC lawsuit lure).

Consequences for Cybersecurity

Ignoring the public information blind spot significantly increases an organization's security risk by allowing attackers to complete their reconnaissance phase undetected.

• Elevated BEC/Phishing Risk: Attackers leverage publicly available data to craft compelling, personalized attacks that bypass technical email filters and employee training.

• Inaccurate Risk Assessment: Internal risk models that score only known assets are fundamentally flawed because they miss critical, externally exposed vulnerabilities that attackers have already identified.

• Regulatory Non-Compliance: Failure to monitor and remediate externally exposed sensitive data can lead to regulatory fines and mandated disclosures under frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA, or SEC rules.

Effective cybersecurity requires an "attacker's-eye view" of the organization's public and external information to close this blind spot.

ThreatNG is specifically designed to close the Public Information Blind Spot by providing the external, unauthenticated, and continuous view that most internal security tools miss. It focuses on identifying, quantifying, and providing actionable context for all data and infrastructure exposed outside the organization’s traditional perimeter.

Closing the Public Information Blind Spot with ThreatNG

External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring

ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery and continuous monitoring of the external attack surface, ensuring that all publicly visible assets are identified and tracked, thereby illuminating the blind spot.

• Example of ThreatNG Helping (Forgotten Assets): ThreatNG's Continuous Monitoring detects a forgotten asset that was missed by internal scanners —a publicly accessible staging subdomain hosted on an external platform like Heroku. This discovery, made from the perspective of an attacker, closes the blind spot regarding Shadow IT assets.

External Assessment (Security Ratings)

ThreatNG’s security ratings quantify the risks associated with public information exposure, translating the severity of the blind spot into a measurable business risk.

• Data Leak Susceptibility Security Rating: This rating is highly relevant as it quantifies the exposure of sensitive data, a significant component of the blind spot.

• Detailed Example (Sensitive Code Leaks): A low rating is triggered by uncovering external digital risks across Cloud Exposure (specifically exposed open cloud buckets) or Compromised Credentials. The existence of an exposed cloud bucket in a Google Cloud Platform environment, as confirmed by the rating, constitutes a leak of sensitive data that was previously in the blind spot, revealing a high-risk compliance failure.

• BEC & Phishing Susceptibility Security Rating: This rating quantifies the risk of Impersonation Risk and fraud, which relies entirely on public information exposure.

• Detailed Example (Impersonation Infrastructure): The rating is based on Domain Name Permutations and Domain Name Record Analysis (missing DMARC and SPF records). Missing DMARC and SPF records constitute a public configuration failure that allows attackers to spoof the corporate email domain easily. This poor rating highlights a major public configuration flaw that attackers exploit for highly credible phishing —a classic public information blind spot.

Investigation Modules

The investigation modules allow security teams to drill down into the specific sources of public information that attackers exploit, gaining the "attacker's-eye view".

• Sensitive Code Exposure: This module directly addresses the blind spot concerning leaked credentials and intellectual property.

• Detailed Example (Sensitive Code Leaks): The Code Repository Exposure module discovers public code repositories and scans them for exposed secrets. An investigation might reveal an AWS Access Key ID or a PGP private key block that was accidentally committed to a public Git repository. This confirmed leak is critical intelligence an attacker would use for initial access, and it is immediately brought out of the blind spot.

• Domain Intelligence (Domain Name Permutations): This module identifies and validates malicious lookalike infrastructure.

• Detailed Example (Impersonation Infrastructure): The module detects and groups manipulations of a domain, such as substitutions, additions, and homoglyphs, and provides the associated mail records. The discovery of a typosquatting domain, mycompany-portal.com (dictionary addition of "portal"), with an active email record confirms the malicious intent and closes the blind spot regarding active phishing infrastructure.

• Search Engine Exploitation: This module explicitly examines an organization’s susceptibility to information exposure via search engines.

• Detailed Example (Digital Footprint Exposures): This module helps users investigate the organization’s susceptibility to exposing Public Passwords, Potential Sensitive Information, or Admin Directories through files like Robots.txt. This proactively identifies misconfigurations that attackers routinely exploit during reconnaissance.

Intelligence Repositories

The DarCache repositories provide continuous, high-confidence intelligence from sources often inaccessible to internal security teams, such as the deep and dark web.

• DarCache Dark Web: This repository tracks mentions of the organization and associated Compromised Credentials.

• Example of ThreatNG Helping (Adverse Media/Human Exposures): Monitoring this repository reveals compromised credentials associated with key employees, which is crucial intelligence for preventing insider threats or BEC attacks. This essential information exists solely in the dark web blind spot and is brought to light by ThreatNG.

• DarCache ESG: This repository tracks various ESG Violations, which serve as Adverse Media and a pretext for social engineering.

• Example of ThreatNG Helping (Adverse Media): These violations, such as a financial or employment offense, are public legal records that an attacker can use to create a highly credible BEC Lawsuit Lure pretext.

Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG's external intelligence is valuable for cooperatively working with internal solutions to operationalize the process of closing the public information blind spot.

• Vulnerability Management (VM) Tools: ThreatNG assesses the risk posed by exposed assets, complementing internal VM scanning.

• Example of ThreatNG and Complementary Solutions: ThreatNG identifies an exposed subdomain missing the HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) header, which contributes to a low Cyber Risk Exposure rating. This confirmed, high-confidence external misconfiguration is automatically sent to the internal VM tool, forcing a remediation ticket for an asset that the internal scanner may have previously overlooked.

• Security Awareness Training Platforms: ThreatNG identifies the exact phishing lures being set up externally, enabling customized training.

• Example of ThreatNG and Complementary Solutions: ThreatNG identifies a new, malicious Domain Name Permutation like mycompany-verify.com via Domain Intelligence. This specific external threat intelligence is fed into the organization’s security awareness training platform, which then customizes the phishing simulations to use this exact lookalike domain, directly training employees to spot the threats emerging from the public information blind spot.