Web Exposure
Web Exposure in cybersecurity refers to the collective vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or security gaps within an organization's internet-facing assets that a malicious actor could exploit to gain unauthorized access, steal data, or cause damage.
It is a critical component of a broader concept known as Cyber Exposure or Threat Exposure, which focuses on proactively identifying and managing all potential pathways an attacker could take to compromise an organization's digital infrastructure.
Key Components of Web Exposure
Web Exposure focuses explicitly on assets that are accessible from the public internet, which constitute a significant part of an organization's External Attack Surface.
Internet-Facing Assets: These include any resources directly reachable via the web, such as:
Web Applications: Customer-facing websites, internal web portals, e-commerce platforms, etc.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): Endpoints that allow different software systems to communicate.
Cloud Resources: Publicly accessible storage buckets (like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage), virtual machine instances, or serverless functions.
Network Components: Firewalls, routers, and other network devices with administrative interfaces exposed online.
Email and DNS Servers: Public-facing services necessary for communication.
Sources of Exposure: These are the specific weaknesses that an attacker can target:
Software Vulnerabilities: Flaws in code, such as those that lead to SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), or remote code execution.
Misconfigurations: Default passwords, overly permissive access control policies, unnecessary services running, or exposed debugging features.
Outdated Components: Using old or unsupported libraries, frameworks, or operating systems with known, unpatched vulnerabilities.
Information Leakage: Inadvertently exposing sensitive data like metadata, internal IP addresses, or unencrypted secrets in public repositories or error messages.
Weak Authentication/Authorization: Flaws such as broken access controls or the lack of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
Associated Risks and Impacts
High Web Exposure directly translates into a high security risk. Successful exploitation of Web Exposure can lead to severe consequences:
Data Breach/Theft: Unauthorized access to sensitive information, including customer Personally Identifiable Information (PII), intellectual property, or financial data.
Reputational Damage: Loss of customer trust, negative media coverage, and harm to the organization's brand.
Financial Loss: Costs associated with incident response, regulatory fines (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), legal fees, and lost business revenue due to downtime.
System Disruption: Attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) can take public-facing services offline, halting business operations.
Ransomware: Attackers may gain initial access through a web exposure and then deploy ransomware to encrypt systems and hold data hostage.
Mitigation Strategies
Managing Web Exposure is typically handled through a process called Exposure Management or Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), which involves:
Continuous Asset Discovery: Maintaining an accurate, real-time inventory of all internet-facing assets and services.
Vulnerability & Configuration Scanning: Regularly scanning all web assets for known vulnerabilities and configuration weaknesses.
Risk Prioritization: Assessing the risk of each discovered exposure based on its exploitability, the criticality of the affected asset, and the potential business impact.
Remediation: Implementing controls to fix the exposure, which includes:
Patch Management: Applying software updates and security patches immediately.
Secure Configuration: Enforcing the principle of least privilege, disabling unnecessary services, and using strong, secure defaults.
Input Validation: Thoroughly checking all user input to web applications to prevent injection attacks.
Strong Authentication: Implementing Multi-Factor Authentication and secure session management.
Validation: Testing the effectiveness of the fixes through penetration testing or red-teaming exercises to ensure the exposure is truly closed.
ThreatNG is an all-in-one external attack surface management (EASM), digital risk protection (DRP), and security ratings solution that helps an organization proactively manage its security by providing an attacker's "outside-in" view of its internet-exposed assets. It transforms chaotic manual searching into decisive security insight.
External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG provides a foundational understanding of the attack surface through External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring.
External Discovery: It automatically performs purely external, unauthenticated discovery without use any connectors, meaning it finds assets exactly as an attacker would. This includes uncovering Subdomains, Domain Name Permutations (typosquatting, homoglyphs, etc.), Mobile Apps in marketplaces, and nearly 4,000 technologies used on the external attack surface.
Continuous Monitoring: The platform continuously monitors the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings for all organizations, ensuring immediate detection of new exposures or configuration drift.
Example of ThreatNG Helping: A global retail company launches a new marketing campaign using the domain company-pay.com. ThreatNG's Domain Name Permutations and Targeted Key Words module immediately discovers company-pay.com and, more critically, the available permutation mycompany-pay.com. This allows the security team to register the lookalike domain, preventing a potential phishing or brand abuse attack before it starts.
External Assessment and Security Ratings
ThreatNG performs multiple detailed External Assessments to generate actionable insights and a Security Rating from A through F.
Cyber Risk Exposure: This score considers technical parameters like exposed certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, and sensitive ports. It factors in Code Secret Exposure by investigating public code repositories for sensitive data. For example, it might find an AWS Secret Access Key or a private SSH key exposed in a public GitHub repository.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: This check is highly detailed. It first identifies all associated subdomains, then uses DNS enumeration to find CNAME records pointing to third-party services like Heroku, AWS/S3, or Shopify. It then performs a validation check to see if the CNAME points to an inactive or unclaimed resource (a "dangling DNS" state), confirming the vulnerability and prioritizing the risk.
Example: If a subdomain like
oldblog.mycompany.compoints via a CNAME record to a defunct Tumblr site, ThreatNG would flag this susceptibility because an attacker could register the Tumblr name and claim the subdomain, using it for phishing.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This score is derived from exposed sensitive ports, exposed private IPs, known vulnerabilities, and dark web presence, including compromised credentials, ransomware events, and gang activity.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: This is calculated using factors such as Domain Intelligence (available and taken domain permutations and web3 domains) and Email Intelligence (email security presence, such as DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records, and format prediction). A low score indicates the organization is highly susceptible to spoofed emails.
Investigation Modules and Intelligence Repositories
ThreatNG's Reconnaissance Hub provides a unified interface for actively querying the entire external digital footprint. This is powered by detailed Investigation Modules and rich Intelligence Repositories (DarCache).
Investigation Modules (Examples)
Domain Intelligence: Uncovers technical data such as DNS Record Analysis (IP Identification and support for over 70 vendor technologies, including Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Salesforce), WHOIS Intelligence, and Certificate Intelligence (status, issuers, and associated organizations).
Sensitive Code Exposure: Discovers public code repositories and mobile applications, searching for Access Credentials (e.g., GitHub Access Token, APIs) and Security Credentials (e.g., RSA Private Key).
Search Engine Exploitation: Investigates susceptibility to exposing sensitive information via search engines. It also looks at Website Control Files like
robots.txtfor hints about secure directories or emails andsecurity.txtfor security contact or Bug Bounty Program information.Example: The Search Engine Attack Surface feature might uncover a publicly indexed PDF file (
Susceptible Files) containing user data that was accidentally linked in a Robots.txt file.
Social Media: Modules like Reddit Discovery transform public chatter ("Narrative Risk" / "Conversational Attack Surface") into an early warning intelligence system. LinkedIn Discovery identifies employees most susceptible to social engineering.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
ThreatNG continuously maintains and updates its intelligence repositories, branded as DarCache.
DarCache Vulnerability: Provides a proactive approach to risk management by understanding the real-world exploitability of vulnerabilities. It contains:
NVD (DarCache NVD): Technical details like CVSS Score and Severity.
EPSS (DarCache EPSS): A probabilistic estimate of the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited in the near future, allowing for forward-looking prioritization.
KEV (DarCache KEV): A list of vulnerabilities actively being exploited in the wild.
DarCache eXploit: Direct links to Verified Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploits on platforms like GitHub, helping security teams reproduce the vulnerability and assess its real-world impact.
DarCache Dark Web & Ransomware: Tracks Compromised Credentials and Over 70 Ransomware Gangs and their Activities.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's focus on external exposure and proactive threat context allows it to enhance other security solutions:
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): ThreatNG's Continuous Monitoring and Prioritized Reporting (High, Medium, Low, Informational) can feed high-fidelity, validated external risk data into a SIEM. For example, suppose ThreatNG's DarCache Ransomware and Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility score suddenly increases for an organization. In that case, the SIEM can use this unique external context to immediately raise the alert priority for any internal endpoint activity on exposed systems, enabling a faster response.
Vulnerability Management (VM) Tools: Traditional VM tools often focus on the internal network and known assets. ThreatNG fills the External Attack Surface gap by discovering unknown assets, such as unsanctioned Cloud and SaaS implementations. This new inventory, complete with prioritized risk scores and MITRE ATT&CK Mapping, can be imported into a VM tool to ensure these internet-exposed assets are included in internal vulnerability scans. For example, ThreatNG might find a development environment that should be private, and the VM tool can then perform a deep, authenticated scan on that now-known asset.
GRC/Compliance Platforms: ThreatNG's External GRC Assessment and Reporting capabilities directly map external vulnerabilities and risks to compliance frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST CSF, and POPIA. This mapping provides a continuous, outside-in audit for compliance. This data can be automatically sent to a GRC platform to provide objective evidence that the organization is uncovering and addressing external security and compliance gaps.
Reporting, Knowledge, and Collaboration
Reporting: ThreatNG provides extensive reports, including Executive, Technical, and Prioritized (High, Medium, Low, and Informational), as well as Security Ratings (A-F).
Knowledgebase: The solution features an embedded knowledge base that provides Risk levels for prioritization, Reasoning to understand the findings, Recommendations for practical risk-reduction guidance, and Reference links for further investigation.
Collaboration and Management: The platform fosters cross-functional cooperation by dynamically generating Correlation Evidence Questionnaires based on the discovery and assessment results. This facilitates communication between the security team and other departments, such as IT or legal.
