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 uses 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 ISO 27001 Assessment
Addressing the Compliance Paradox
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Your ISO 27001 certification confirms that your organization has the appropriate internal policies, processes, and documentation in place. However, compliance is a baseline, not the finish line. Certification often fosters a False Sense of External Security, because internal audits cannot fully assess risk from the perspective of an unauthenticated adversary. Adversaries only interact with your exposed external attack surface (EASM)—misconfigured ports, leaked credentials, and abandoned cloud assets. If a breach occurs on your watch while you hold a recent ISO certificate, the headline invalidates years of GRC effort, leading to regulatory and professional catastrophe. The ThreatNG assessment closes this gap by continuously validating your external controls.
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The most critical gap is the continuous failure of the controls governing Configuration Management (A.8.9) and Access Control (A.5.15) to withstand externally visible threats.
Internal audits confirm policy, but ThreatNG's External Adversary View exposes proof of failure in practice. Specifically, our assessment finds high-impact deficiencies such as:
Files in Open Cloud Buckets: Irrefutable evidence of failure in A.8.9, A.5.15, and A.5.34 (Privacy) due to misconfigured cloud storage exposing PII publicly.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: A critical failure in A.5.23 (Supplier Relationships) and A.8.9 when dangling DNS records allow an attacker to hijack a trusted brand asset.
Compromised Emails: A direct failure of A.5.17 (Authentication Information) and A.5.15, providing initial access vectors via credentials already exposed on the dark web.
These findings demonstrate that compliance is theoretical until validated against external reality.
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No. This solution is engineered to reduce the "Hidden Tax on the SOC" and eliminate the Crisis of Context. Traditional risk reports require GRC teams to correlate technical findings with business impact and ISO controls manually. ThreatNG automates this process through the Context Engine™ to deliver Legal-Grade Attribution™.
This means every exposed port, misconfigured header, or leaked credential is automatically mapped to the precise ISO 27001 control (e.g., "Exposed Default Port = A.8.20 Network Security Failure"), providing irrefutable, contextualized proof. This certainty accelerates remediation and eliminates the time wasted arguing over whether a finding is factual or just noise.
The Methodology
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Penetration testing is a time-bound snapshot, and authenticated vulnerability scanning is limited to assets and configurations you already know about.
ThreatNG provides a continuous External Adversary View through purely unauthenticated discovery. We emulate the reconnaissance phase of an actual attacker:
Continuous Discovery: We actively search for Shadow IT and forgotten assets, like retired development subdomains or abandoned third-party services, that are outside your known asset inventory.
External Validation: We verify your controls are adequate from the outside by confirming whether a control deficiency, such as a missing HSTS header or anexposed VPN, can be accessed without credentials.
GRC Mapping: We automatically translate those external exposures into compliance language, providing direct, objective evidence of ISO 27001 Control Validation (e.g., A.8.2 Technical vulnerability management).
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Legal-Grade Attribution™ is a key capability of our Certainty Intelligence platform. It eliminates ambiguity by correlating raw external technical risks with the decisive business, legal, and regulatory context (e.g., confirming whether a vulnerability is actively exploited via KEV/EPSS data or whether the asset is tied to a specific SEC filing).
For GRC Directors, this provides Irrefutable Authority. You no longer deliver vague risk scores; you present objective, corroborated proof of control failure, immediately justifying mandatory remediation to the board and operational teams. This process makes audit evidence a dynamic, actionable business resource rather than just historical paperwork.
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The External GRC Assessment is designed to provide continuous validation and objective evidence for high-risk ISO 27001 controls, translating technical exposures into actionable compliance failures. The assessment focuses on external factors that traditional internal audits often overlook, including the following key controls:
A.8.9 Configuration Management: Objective evidence of configuration gaps is provided by findings such as Files in Open Cloud Buckets and Missing Security Headers (like HSTS and CSP), indicating immediate failures in asset hardening and security baseline enforcement.
A.5.15 Access Control: The assessment validates access control effectiveness by detecting weaknesses like Exposed Admin Pages, active Default Ports Scanned (e.g., SSH, RDP), and Compromised Credentials found outside the organization.
A.5.23 Information Security in Supplier Relationships: Failures in vendor oversight are identified through external risks such as Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility and other Third-party service exposures, which represent critical supply chain vulnerabilities.
A.8.2 Technical Vulnerability Management: Continuous external monitoring identifies Critical and High Severity Vulnerabilities Found alongside externally Exposed Ports (default and custom), providing clear proof of gaps in vulnerability management processes.
A.8.20 Network Security: Deficiencies in perimeter protection are highlighted by findings like Missing DMARC/SPF records, a Lack of WAF (Web Application Firewall), and the exposure of Exposed Private IPs.
Audit and Outcome
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ISO 27001 surveillance audits review the continuous operation of your controls. ThreatNG transforms compliance from an annual snapshot into Continuous Security Validation.
The platform aids the audit process by:
Providing Proof of Effectiveness: Offering objective data that demonstrates that controls (such as A.8.9 configuration) are not merely documented but are actively functional against external threats.
Facilitating Remediation: Generating Correlation Evidence Questionnaires and dynamically created reports that structure the technical evidence (A.8.2 vulnerability) for auditors and remediation teams, significantly speeding up cross-functional fixes.
Demonstrating Oversight (A.6.1): Proving to the auditor that the organization is actively monitoring and managing its external risk exposure, aligning with best practices for proactive risk management.
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Yes. The ThreatNG platform integrates comprehensive vulnerability intelligence repositories (DarCache Vulnerability) that give context beyond basic severity scores.
We enrich every discovered external vulnerability (A.8.2 failure) with confirmed details from:
KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities): Proving if a vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild.
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System): Providing a probabilistic estimate of the likelihood of that vulnerability being weaponized in the near future.
This allows the CISO to prioritize remediation based on demonstrable risk and strategic threat intelligence (A.5.7), rather than theoretical severity alone.
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The core business benefit is the shift from reacting to breaches to attaining Verifiable Security Confidence.
This investment provides:
Fiduciary Resilience: You can confidently assure the Board and executive leadership that the organization’s high-value controls (A.6.1) are demonstrably effective against real-world external attack vectors.
Quantified Risk Management: Utilizing the ThreatNG Cyber Risk Exposure and Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility security ratings (A-F scale), you convert ambiguous risk into clear, prioritized business metrics.
Reputational Safeguard: By proactively eliminating critical external threats such as Subdomain Takeovers, you preventhigh-impact, public incidents that severely damage brand trust and professional reputation.