Security Operations
Security Operations (SecOps) solutions are the tools, processes, and people focused on protecting an organization's assets by monitoring, analyzing, and responding to cyber threats. The goal of SecOps is to maintain a continuous, defensive posture and reduce the time it takes to detect and mitigate an attack (Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR)).
Security Monitoring (SIEM/XDR)
This category focuses on the continuous collection, correlation, and analysis of security data from across the entire IT environment to detect threats and abnormal activity.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): A foundational technology that aggregates log and event data from various sources (endpoints, networks, applications, security devices) into a central repository. SIEM uses correlation rules to identify security incidents, perform regulatory compliance reporting, and provide an audit trail.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR): An evolution of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). XDR goes beyond the endpoint to integrate and correlate data from the endpoint, network, cloud, email, and identity layers. It uses advanced analytics and automation to provide deeper visibility, contextualize alerts, and orchestrate automated responses across multiple security domains.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Visibility and Correlation. Ensuring that security analysts have a unified, contextual view of an entire attack chain, regardless of where it starts or pivots.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
Alert Fatigue/Noise: The system generates too many low-fidelity or redundant alerts, causing analysts to miss critical threats (the "needle in the haystack" problem).
Insufficient Log Coverage: Failure to collect logs from critical new sources (e.g., specific cloud services, shadow IT), leaving blind spots for attackers to use for undetected activity.
Lack of Context: Alerts are not correlated across different security controls (e.g., an endpoint alert isn't linked to a network flow alert), making it difficult to understand the severity or scope of the attack.
Audit Trail Tampering: Attackers gain access to the log repository and modify or delete records to cover their tracks, crippling forensic investigation efforts.
Vulnerability & Risk Management
This category encompasses the tools and processes used to proactively identify, prioritize, and remediate security weaknesses across the entire environment, including infrastructure, applications, and third parties.
Vulnerability Assessment (VA) Tools: Tools that scan systems, networks, and applications to identify known security flaws (CVEs), missing patches, and misconfigurations.
Security Rating/Attack Surface Management: Solutions that provide an external, attacker's view of an organization's digital footprint and assign a score based on observed risks (like exposed ports, risky email configurations, or leaked credentials).
Patch Management: The systematic process of deploying updates and fixes to prevent the exploitation of known vulnerabilities.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Proactive Remediation and Prioritization. Shifting from a reactive posture to a proactive one by quantifying risk and focusing limited resources on the flaws that are most likely to be exploited.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
Prioritization Failure: Remediation teams spend time addressing thousands of low-risk vulnerabilities, rather than focusing on the critical flaws that are actively being exploited in the wild.
Unmanaged Attack Surface: The organization is unaware of external, internet-facing assets (like forgotten cloud instances or test servers) that are not being scanned, leading to a critical security blind spot.
Third-Party Risk Blindness: Failure to assess the security posture of critical vendors and partners who handle sensitive data, leaving the organization exposed to supply chain attacks.
Inefficient Patching: Delays in deploying critical security patches after their release leave systems vulnerable to exploitation by easily obtained proof-of-concept code.
Access & Identity Security
While Identity and Access Management (IAM) defines policies, Security Operations focuses explicitly on the operational monitoring and enforcement of these identity controls to stop real-time compromise.
Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR): Solutions dedicated to detecting attacks against identity systems (e.g., Active Directory, Azure AD) and stopping lateral movement and privilege escalation by compromised accounts.
Privileged Access Management (PAM): Tools that control, monitor, and audit elevated access rights for highly sensitive accounts (e.g., root, administrator). They enforce the Principle of Least Privilege and ensure privileged actions are traceable.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Enforcement: Operationalizing and enforcing the use of MFA across all critical systems to defend against simple password theft.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Control and Containment of Identities. Ensuring that compromised identities are immediately detected and contained, preventing attackers from escalating privileges or moving laterally using stolen credentials.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
Credential Theft: The foundational risk where attackers use phishing or malware to steal a user's password or session token.
Lateral Movement Exploitation: Attackers use a single compromised low-privilege account to hop between systems, exploiting poor network segmentation or over-privileged access to reach high-value data.
Abuse of Privileged Accounts: Attackers compromise an administrator or service account that is not secured by PAM, giving them complete, unrestricted control over core infrastructure.
MFA Bypass in Real-Time: Attackers successfully employ sophisticated techniques (like MFA fatigue attacks or session hijacking) to bypass strong authentication, which ITDR and PAM must be designed to detect and block.
ThreatNG is a critical solution for securing Security Operations (SecOps) because it provides the external, unauthenticated intelligence that traditional internal solutions often lack. ThreatNG’s data (exposed assets, external misconfigurations, and dark web credentials) acts as a high-fidelity external threat feed, reducing Alert Fatigue in Security Monitoring and improving Prioritization Failure in Vulnerability & Risk Management.
ThreatNG’s External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors, which solves the core SecOps problem of an Unmanaged Attack Surface.
Discovery of Shadow IT: ThreatNG maps the entire digital footprint, including forgotten domains, subdomains, and cloud services. If a developer sets up a forgotten test server or a misconfigured public cloud storage bucket containing internal security reports (a risk to Security Monitoring), ThreatNG detects it immediately.
Continuous Monitoring: SecOps requires a constant defensive posture. ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring. If an exposed port on a critical server appears or a TLS certificate expires, ThreatNG generates an immediate alert. This rapid external validation is essential for reducing the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD).
Code Secret Exposure Discovery: This directly impacts Access & Identity Security. ThreatNG investigates public code repositories for hard-coded credentials.
Example: ThreatNG finds a hard-coded API key for the organization's SIEM/XDR ingestion endpoint in a public repository. This single finding flags a critical vulnerability that could lead to Audit Trail Tampering or compromise of the entire Security Monitoring system.
External Assessment Capabilities
ThreatNG’s External Assessment assigns scores that provide risk context to SecOps teams, enabling them to transition from reactive to proactive security.
Data Leak Susceptibility: This score is derived from Cloud and SaaS Exposure and Dark Web Presence, directly addressing the risks of Credential Theft and Lateral Movement.
Example: A high score is triggered when administrator credentials for the Access & Identity Security systems (e.g., the PAM console or a critical directory server) are found in DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials). This is the highest-fidelity warning possible, enabling SecOps to immediately force a password reset and halt an attack before it begins.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This score addresses weaknesses in Vulnerability & Risk Management prioritization.
Example: The assessment identifies an exposed RDP or SSH port on a public-facing server that also has an unpatched, high-severity CVE. This combination indicates an extremely high probability of exploitation, allowing the remediation team to focus on fixing this specific critical flaw rather than hundreds of less critical issues, directly solving Prioritization Failure.
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: This score assesses the security of external login pages for Access & Identity Security systems.
Example: The assessment detects a vulnerability on the login page for the organization’s MFA Enforcement portal. An attacker could use this vulnerability to steal session tokens, facilitating MFA Bypass in Real-Time.
Investigation Modules and Technology Identification
ThreatNG’s Investigation Modules provide the granular context required for Security Monitoring and Vulnerability & Risk Management teams to understand what they are defending.
Technology Identification: ThreatNG identifies the external presence and versions of critical infrastructure.
Example: ThreatNG identifies the exact version of the web server software used by the organization's public-facing application. This information, combined with DarCache Vulnerability data, enables the Vulnerability & Risk Management team to quickly determine if the asset is vulnerable to a known exploit, thereby addressing a core part of the Unmanaged Attack Surface.
Search Engine Exploitation: This module directly addresses Insufficient Log Coverage and Audit Trail Tampering risks by looking for exposed sensitive data.
Example: The module detects that a search engine has indexed a development folder containing temporary log files from a security application, potentially exposing internal user names, system architecture details, or sensitive alerts that the SIEM/XDR system should have collected.
Archived Web Pages: This feature secures legacy assets that often fall out of the Vulnerability & Risk Management scope.
Example: ThreatNG discovers an archived login page for a forgotten administrative tool that bypasses MFA Enforcement. This critical finding allows the SecOps team to decommission the shadow asset.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
The Intelligence Repositories provide the high-fidelity threat data that differentiates ThreatNG and significantly improves Security Monitoring efficacy.
DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials): This directly addresses the risk of Credential Theft against Access & Identity Security. It alerts the organization if Privileged Access Management (PAM) or administrator credentials are found on the Dark Web, giving SecOps the capability to proactively revoke access before the credential is used for Lateral Movement Exploitation.
DarCache Vulnerability (NVD, EPSS, KEV, eXploit): This is the core engine for prioritizing vulnerabilities. By combining technical severity (NVD) with exploit likelihood (EPSS) and real-world exploitation (KEV), it directly solves the problem of Prioritization Failure, ensuring that Vulnerability & Risk Management efforts are focused on flaws that are actively exploited in the wild.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external focus creates powerful synergies when combined with internal SecOps tools:
Security Monitoring (SIEM/XDR) Synergies: ThreatNG acts as a high-fidelity, external threat intelligence source. When ThreatNG identifies an exposed asset or a highly critical vulnerability (Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility), this contextual data is used to enrich the events already in the SIEM/XDR. This external validation transforms a generic internal alert into a critical incident, helping to solve Alert Fatigue/Noise by proving the external exploitability of a detected internal issue.
Vulnerability & Risk Management (VA/Patching) Synergies: Traditional VA scans the known environment. ThreatNG’s external discovery (of shadow IT and forgotten assets) expands the scope of the VA scanner. Furthermore, the DarCache Vulnerability data is directly used to prioritize the patch queue, ensuring the SecOps team fixes the vulnerabilities that ThreatNG has identified as being most likely to lead to an external compromise.
Access & Identity Security (ITDR/PAM) Synergies: ThreatNG’s DarCache Rupture findings are the perfect input for ITDR and PAM systems. The intelligence on leaked credentials is used to trigger an automated workflow that immediately disables the compromised account, forces a rotation of the associated private key within the PAM vault, and initiates an investigation into the scope of the potential Abuse of Privileged Accounts.
