Reconnaissance Gap
The Reconnaissance Gap in cybersecurity refers to the fundamental and critical difference between the digital assets and vulnerabilities that an organization's security team is actively aware of and monitoring, and the complete set of exploitable information and attack surfaces that a determined attacker can discover and use during their initial reconnaissance phase.
Understanding the Two Sides of the Gap
This gap exists because defenders typically rely on internal inventories, while attackers use external, unauthenticated, and automated methods to find forgotten or unlisted exposures.
1. The Defender's Limited View (What We See)
Internal processes often constrain the security team's knowledge:
Asset Inventory: They track known assets, but often miss shadow IT, forgotten test environments, or misconfigured cloud resources.
Internal Logs and Scans: Tools run from within the network, so they often fail to replicate the external, public-facing view of the organization's entire digital presence.
Focus on the "Now": Security teams prioritize securing the current, actively managed systems, neglecting past exposures.
2. The Attacker's Comprehensive View (What They See)
Attackers actively seek out information that falls into the defender's blind spot:
Forgotten Infrastructure: They scan for old subdomains, open ports on retired IP addresses, and misconfigured DNS records (like dangling DNS entries).
Leaked Credentials and Secrets: They search for hardcoded API keys, exposed database connection strings, and compromised employee credentials available on the dark web or in public code repositories.
Historical Data: They leverage public archives to find historical website content, old administrative login pages, and documents that reveal the system's architecture or employee names for social engineering.
Impact of the Reconnaissance Gap
The existence of a significant Reconnaissance Gap means the attacker can choose the initial point of entry from a list of vulnerabilities the defender is not even tracking. The gap allows the adversary to achieve initial access via the easiest, least-defended path, making the subsequent attack both simpler to execute and harder to stop.
ThreatNG directly helps close the Reconnaissance Gap by providing the external, unauthenticated, and continuously monitored view of the attack surface that an attacker would use during their reconnaissance phase. By operating purely from the outside in, ThreatNG uncovers the blind spots—the forgotten assets and leaked secrets—that typically define the reconnaissance gap.
ThreatNG's Role in Eliminating the Reconnaissance Gap
ThreatNG’s capabilities ensure that the security team’s knowledge of the organization’s digital footprint is as comprehensive as an adversary’s.
External Discovery
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors. This is the foundational step for closing the gap, as it identifies assets outside the corporate firewall that the security team may be unaware of.
Example of Discovery Helping Close the Gap: ThreatNG's Subdomain Intelligence uses DNS enumeration to discover all associated subdomains. If a development team launched a test environment on a third-party platform (like Vercel or Heroku ) and forgot to decommission it, ThreatNG finds this forgotten, unmonitored asset. This unknown asset represents a critical part of the reconnaissance gap that ThreatNG brings into view.
External Assessment (Mapping the Attacker's Strategy)
ThreatNG’s assessments validate and prioritize security findings in the context of an attack, turning simple discoveries into actionable intelligence that closes the gap.
External Adversary View: This capability explicitly performs unauthenticated, outside-in discovery and assessment of the attack surface, identifying vulnerabilities and exposures in a manner that an attacker would. This directly translates the reconnaissance gap into a strategic risk narrative.
Example: ThreatNG’s assessment detects Sensitive Code Discovery and Exposure, revealing an AWS Access Key ID in a public repository. This single piece of intelligence is the most valuable output of an attacker's reconnaissance. By flagging this finding, ThreatNG closes the gap on the attacker's path to Initial Access.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: This assessment identifies the dangerous historical risk of a CNAME record pointing to an inactive or unclaimed third-party service (such as an old Unbounce landing page or a Zendesk help desk).
Example: An attacker conducting reconnaissance would look for this "dangling DNS" to hijack the domain for a phishing campaign. ThreatNG's assessment confirms the "dangling DNS" state, closing the gap on an easy, high-authority entry point that bypasses perimeter defenses.
Continuous Monitoring and Reporting
Continuous Monitoring of the external attack surface ensures that the reconnaissance gap, once closed, doesn't reopen due to new misconfigurations or asset spin-up.
Reports like the Technical and Prioritized reports provide actionable detail, while the MITRE ATT&CK Mapping gives the security team the strategic context needed to understand the significance of the gap.
Reporting Example: ThreatNG automatically translates the raw findings on an organization's external attack surface—such as leaked credentials or open ports—into a strategic narrative by correlating them with specific MITRE ATT&CK techniques. This shows security leaders exactly how an adversary can use the exposed information (the reconnaissance gap) to achieve initial access.
Investigation Modules and Intelligence Repositories
The Investigation Modules are the operational tools that systematically hunt for the dispersed, high-value information that defines the reconnaissance gap.
Search Engine Attack Surface: This facility helps users investigate an organization’s susceptibility to exposing sensitive information via search engines. This directly mimics an attacker's search-engine-based reconnaissance, or "dorking".
Example: ThreatNG uncovers that the organization is susceptible to exposing Public Passwords or Privileged Folders via search engines, providing the exact query result an attacker would have used to gain reconnaissance.
Username Exposure: This module conducts a passive reconnaissance scan to determine whether a given username is available or taken across a wide range of social media and high-risk forums.
Example: By finding that a key developer's username is exposed on a platform like GitHub or a Developer Forum, ThreatNG reveals the social engineering context an attacker would use to build trust or target a personal account.
The Intelligence Repositories (DarCache) enrich these findings with confirmed external threat data.
DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials): This repository confirms whether a username discovered through the Username Exposure module has associated compromised credentials, a critical piece of reconnaissance for a password-stuffing attack.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external focus provides the necessary validation and context for internal security tools, ensuring the entire security ecosystem is focused on the real external threats.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Platform: ThreatNG identifies a high-risk finding, such as an Exposed Port on an unknown server with high Vulnerabilities on Subdomains. This external threat intelligence is fed to a SIEM Platform. The SIEM platform then uses this data to cross-reference internal logs and security events, confirming that any traffic attempting to exploit that exposed port is immediately prioritized as a high-fidelity breach attempt, thereby making the SIEM's internal alerts actionable and closing the situational awareness gap.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Tool: ThreatNG's Cloud and SaaS Exposure module discovers an Open Exposed Cloud Bucket in Google Cloud Platform. This external finding is sent to a CSPM Tool. The CSPM tool then uses the ThreatNG finding to validate the exposure from the outside, trigger a high-priority alert, and enforce the necessary internal configuration change to secure the bucket, ensuring the inaction of an insecure cloud setup is immediately reversed.
