Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

May 2022

The role of attack surface management to bolster data breach protection

The attack surface is an organization’s digital exposure that an attacker could exploit to get unauthorized access to a system and extract data or other sensitive information. It could also be used as a point within a chain of attacks. As Organizations increasingly rely on SaaS services and products, the digital attack surface is more than the firewall and network.

Performance improvements, snappier ports, and spring cleaning

The vulnerabilities page allows you to see all findings across your attack surface. This includes simple filters that let you specify what you want to focus on, including the level of severity, which domains you want to look at, and whether it was found in the past week or the past month.

Is the perimeter dead?

This question still triggers some interesting discussions among security professionals. Does the perimeter still exist, or has it become impossible to outline due to the immense asset list and expansion of an organization’s attack surface? Included by Gartner in 2021 as a major cybersecurity category and an emerging product, the External Attack Surface Management (EASM) term might be new. Still, the idea behind it is nothing new: identifying risks coming from internet-facing assets that an organization may be unaware of.

What are organizations doing wrong when it comes to security?

What are organizations doing wrong when it comes to security? While today’s code-quality security is good, the sharing between each domain or principle is lacking, such as using infrastructure as code. Some people have become lazy, using other people’s templates and sometimes without knowing the security details. There is no technical depth (the rule now is; if it works, it works). Security metrics are valued by the exploitation that happens. We learn by being hacked, and that is not how it should work.

Understanding pentesting vs an automated hacker-powered tool

Penetration testing is a vulnerability detection mechanism that uses multistep and multivector attack scenarios to find vulnerabilities and attempts to exploit them. While some companies might be continuously pentesting, others don’t at all, this is often due to lacking security culture, budget limitations, or both.

Gartner's top security threat and pentesting vs continuous scans - what you missed from Hack Yourself Stockholm 2021

Included by Gartner in 2021 as a major cybersecurity category and an emerging product, the External Attack Surface Management (EASM) term might be new. Still, the idea behind it is nothing new: identifying risks coming from internet-facing assets that an organization may be unaware of. A few companies, including Detectify, have been highlighting the importance of the attack surface and understanding the potential risks of the constantly-changing environment.

Newly minted filters, improvements to bulk actions, and SSL assessments

Remediating vulnerabilities efficiently is the cornerstone of a great vulnerability management program. Prioritizing becomes paramount as resources are often limited. Sometimes teams might pinpoint specific vulnerability types that are particularly risky for their attack surfaces, such as a misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket or even a new XSS vulnerability. Users can now filter the /Vulnerabilities view by title, such as a specific type of XSS or even the CVE name.

Phishing, OWASP, EASM, and hacking WordPress - top themes from Hack Yourself London

When Algolia’s security program manager Regina Bluman ran a Twitter poll to see how many people within the security industry understood the concept of EASM, she didn’t expect that the term is far from being on an IT security team’s radar. Moreover, most were not even aware of it.