External ISO 27001 Assessment
STOP FUNDING THE ILLUSION: Eliminate the "Compliant-Yet-Vulnerable" Paradox with Legal-Grade Attribution™
Your organization has invested significant resources to achieve and maintain ISO 27001 certification, proving your dedication to internal policy and governance. However, executive leadership worldwide is haunted by the false sense of external security, the profound fear that a catastrophic breach could strike while you hold a recent compliance certificate. This External Control Gap exists because the unauthenticated adversary only engages with your external attack surface, bypassing internal audit scopes entirely. The ThreatNG External GRC Assessment for ISO 27001 is the mandatory step that transforms your GRC program from theoretical compliance into demonstrable, real-world security by continuously providing the External Adversary View necessary to eliminate hidden control failures.
Convert Compliance Findings into Irrefutable Executive Mandates
Gain Irrefutable Executive Authority with Legal-Grade Attribution™
The greatest challenge in GRC is not finding risk, but resolving the Crisis of Context: justifying costly, mandatory remediation when the evidence is ambiguous. We eliminate this delay. ThreatNG utilizes its Context Engine™ to deliver Legal-Grade Attribution™, correlating every external technical exposure with decisive business context. This process instantly converts technical findings into undeniable GRC failures—evidence management cannot dismiss. This is the Certainty Intelligence you need to stop arguing over risk and accelerate cross-functional security investments immediately.
Proactively Eliminate Catastrophic Failures in A.8.9 and A.5.23
Internal assessments miss the external factors that drive the most severe compliance violations. Our continuous, unauthenticated discovery targets the hidden high-impact failures that traditional ISO audits overlook:
Configuration Management (A.8.9): We find irrefutable proof of failure, such as Files in Open Cloud Buckets, which signals an immediate, multi-control breach risk.
Supplier Relationships (A.5.23): We expose vendor oversight failures, such as Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility, where orphaned DNS records can be hijacked to impersonate your brand.
By focusing on these definitive external control gaps, you shift from reactive compliance to proactive, verifiable risk retirement, ensuring your GRC efforts translate directly into resilience.
Shift from Audited Compliance to Verifiable Security Confidence
Stop viewing ISO 27001 as an annual snapshot audit and make it a continuous competitive advantage. We provide Continuous Security Validation, using A-F security ratings (e.g., Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility) to give your CISO and Board transparent, objective assurance of your posture. By identifying and remediating critical failures like Compromised Emails (A.5.17 failure) and Exposed Ports (A.8.20 failure) before an incident occurs, you secure your professional reputation and demonstrate fiduciary oversight, transforming your GRC investment into proven, career-defining security confidence.
From External Discovery to Auditable Evidence: ThreatNG's ISO 27001 Report Mapping
The External GRC Assessment reports are engineered to bridge the gap between technical risk and compliance mandates by automatically mapping every unauthenticated finding to the relevant ISO 27001 controls. This capability transforms raw data into Legal-Grade Attribution, providing GRC teams with irrefutable evidence of control failures for auditors and remediation teams. For example, the discovery of Files in Open Cloud Buckets offers conclusive proof of deficiencies in A.8.9 (Configuration Management) and A.5.15 (Access control). At the same time, Compromised Emails directly indicate a failure in A.5.17 (Authentication information). This apparent correlation ensures that remediation efforts are aligned with and fully justify the organization’s ongoing certification requirements.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): External NIST CSF Assessment
This FAQ is designed for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and the VP of Risk & Compliance at publicly traded enterprises, focusing on the strategic and fiduciary value of continuous external risk validation.
The Strategic Mandate: Why This is a Necessity
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Internal vulnerability assessments and penetration testing (VAPT) provide a snapshot of your security from the inside, often relying on authenticated credentials and known assets. This creates an "Illusion of Internal Control." The External NIST CSF Assessment is necessary because modern adversaries attack from the outside in, exploiting assets you didn't even know existed.
It addresses critical NIST failures that internal scans miss:
Asset Inventory Gaps (ID.AM-1): Internal teams often miss exposed VPN endpoints, forgotten cloud resources, or orphaned subdomains.
Configuration Gaps (PR.IP-1): External configuration failures, such as missing basic security headers (HSTS, CSP), are direct violations of secure baselines but are often overlooked by internal tools.
This capability provides the continuous, external assessment required to validate every component of your attack surface from the unauthenticated viewpoint of the adversary.
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The SEC mandates transparency regarding cybersecurity risk management and oversight (ID.GV-1), making continuous due diligence a fiduciary necessity. A breach originating from an easily discoverable external vulnerability (like exposed Code Secrets or an Open Cloud Bucket) can lead to a public 8-K filing and accusations of negligence.
This capability provides auditable proof of proactive external risk management. It continuously maps critical external risks directly to NIST CSF controls, allowing the CISO to:
Quantify Risk (ID.RA-5): Demonstrate that risk prioritization is based on external likelihood (KEV/EPSS data).
Validate Controls: Provide evidence that controls against data leakage (PR.DS-5) and remote access (PR.AC-3) are continuously effective from the perimeter.
Ensure Regulatory Readiness: Transform reactive compliance into a proactive, documented governance process (ID.GV-1).
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We focus on external intelligence indicators that precede a successful attack:
BEC & Phishing: We continuously monitor for Domain Name Permutations - Taken with Mail Record. This is a high-risk indicator that a lookalike domain is actively configured for email spoofing. The platform alerts you to this failure of PR.AC-6 (Identities are proofed) and enables immediate containment (RS.MI-1).
Ransomware: The platform utilizes DarCache intelligence, which includes Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) and tracks 70+ Ransomware Gangs. Suppose we identify a critical vulnerability on an exposed RDP/SSH port (PR.AC-3 risk) that is listed in KEV. In that case, it receives immediate critical priority, ensuring resources address the most immediate, proven threat (ID.RA-5).
Capability & Function: What Is the Assessment?
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The External NIST CSF Assessment is a continuous external audit that leverages External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and Digital Risk Protection (DRP) capabilities to measure your organization's external security effectiveness against the five core functions of the NIST CSF (Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover).
Discovery: It performs purely unauthenticated discovery, mapping every externally visible asset.
Mapping: Every discovered risk—from Compromised Emails to Subdomain Takeover susceptibility —is automatically mapped to the relevant NIST CSF subcategory (e.g., PR.AC-1, ID.AM-2, PR.DS-5).
Scorecarding: It delivers quantified, prioritized reports (High, Medium, Low) and Security Ratings (A through F) that instantly communicate the status of your NIST controls to executives.
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The assessment uncovers and validates a broad range of critical external assets and misconfigurations that live outside your firewall, such as the following high-risk examples:
Code Secrets Found: Leaked API keys or sensitive information exposed in public code repositories (Violation of PR.DS-1/PR.IP-3).
Open Cloud Buckets: Misconfigured access permissions leading to exposed files in AWS, Azure, or GCP (Violation of PR.DS-5).
Mobile Application Exposure: Sensitive credentials or keys found within decentralized mobile apps.
APIs and Admin Pages: Exposed administrative interfaces or forgotten API endpoints on subdomains that provide an unauthenticated attack vector.
The comprehensive coverage extends to identifying and validating exposures like Subdomain Takeover susceptibility, exposed remote access gateways (VPNs Identified), and unmanaged default network ports (Default Port Scan), ensuring complete external risk visibility.
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Traditional GRC tools require manual input and mapping of technical findings to compliance frameworks. Standard EASM tools provide inventory and technical alerts.
The External NIST CSF Assessment differentiates itself by integrating three core functions:
Adversary Focus: It performs unauthenticated discovery, showing you exactly how a threat actor sees your perimeter.
Automated GRC Translation: It automatically translates raw technical findings into precise NIST CSF control failures (e.g., Missing HSTS Header = PR.DS-2 Failure) , eliminating the burden on your team.
Threat Prioritization: It uses KEV and EPSS data to prioritize remediation on vulnerabilities that are actively exploited in the wild , satisfying the CISO’s demand for risk-based focus (ID.RA-5).
CISO Value & Outcome: How It Improves Your Life
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You gain immediate relief from GRC Sprawl. Instead of manually correlating thousands of alerts into board-ready risk language, the External NIST CSF Assessment does it continuously.
This means your team spends less time justifying risks and more time mitigating them. Executive reports are generated automatically, showing performance against NIST functions (Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover) with clear, prioritized actions (High, Medium, Low). This empowers the CISO to deliver a confident narrative on organizational risk posture to the board, reducing Audit Anxiety and strengthening the role as a strategic leader.
Discovery: It performs purely unauthenticated discovery, mapping every externally visible asset.
Mapping: Every discovered risk—from Compromised Emails to Subdomain Takeover susceptibility —is automatically mapped to the relevant NIST CSF subcategory (e.g., PR.AC-1, ID.AM-2, PR.DS-5).
Scorecarding: It delivers quantified, prioritized reports (High, Medium, Low) and Security Ratings (A through F) that instantly communicate the status of your NIST controls to executives.
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The ultimate emotional outcome is the transition from perpetual operational stress to quantifiable certainty and control.
Before: You operate with the fear of the unknown external asset, knowing a breach could happen at any moment due to an unmanaged flaw.
After (Shift from Features to Feelings): You gain Control over the attack surface and Confidence in the boardroom. You know that if a high-risk vulnerability exists on your external perimeter, the platform has found it, prioritized it with threat intelligence , and mapped it to a clear NIST control failure (PR.IP-12). This allows you to achieve the peace of mind that comes with proven, auditable due diligence.
Search Engine Exploitation
Domain Intelligence
Social Media
Sensitive Code Exposure
Cloud and SaaS Exposure
Online Sharing Exposure
Sentiment and Financials
Archived Web Pages
Dark Web
Technology Stack