Attack surface reduction is arguably the most important step in preventing cyberattacks. It is the fundamental step you must perfect to ensure you safeguard and secure your attack surface.
But with it evolving so much over the years, are we adapting fast enough to actually stop threats?
In this article, we will cover what the attack surface is, why you must reduce it, and seven vital strategies to reduce your attack surface rapidly.
A Brief Dive into Understanding Your Attack Surface
What is Attack Surface Reduction?
The attack surface is all the possible attack vectors and points of attack in your network. In simpler words, it is every point in your network an attacker can exploit to access the network.
Attack surface reduction is the process of reducing the attack points in your network. This process includes patching risks, fixing loopholes, and removing the network component completely. Attack surface reduction is an essential component of attack surface management and can make or break your IT security!
Why Must You Reduce It?
The simple fact you must remember is, ‘The smaller the attack surface, the easier it is to protect!’
So, by reducing the attack surface, you give yourself a better chance at combating and preventing cyberattacks.
Here are some key benefits of attack surface reduction:
- Improved IT Security: The most obvious benefit of reducing the attack surface is improving overall IT security. By mitigating potential risks, you make it difficult for the attacker to find attack points and exploit them.
- Proactive Risk Reduction: You don’t react to an attack. Instead, you prevent it! Proactive defense is another important benefit of attack surface reduction and can significantly reduce the pressure on managing threats.
- Increased Cost Effectiveness: The average cost of recovering from a cyberattack is USD 4.45 million! So, preventing cyberattacks can be a much better and cheaper alternative.
Want to know other benefits of reducing your attack surface? Read more
Seven Strategies for Supersonic Attack Surface Reduction (Through CVEM)
Your network’s attack surface can be enormous. Further, it can be spread across different locations too. With your network becoming more complex every day, here are seven strategies you can leverage to reduce your attack surface effectively. And prevent cyberattacks!
SecPod SanerNow is an attack surface management tool that leverages Continuous Vulnerability & Exposure Management(CVEM) framework to simplify and ease the attack surface reduction process. SanerNow will help you easily implement these strategies. Let’s explore it further.
- Complete Asset Discovery:
You can’t protect what you can’t see, and this fact is truer than ever. Apart from the regularly used assets, some IT assets are forgotten or left inactive. These shadow assets are often the point of attack and are easily exploited. Additionally, outdated software in your network can be exploited, too. So, complete asset discovery is vital to effectively reduce your attack surface.
SanerNow, with its real-time network scanning, detects all the assets in your network, including hidden shadow IT assets. Further, it also detects outdated software and rarely-used apps to track assets easily. As a result, you can get a complete picture of your attack surface and reduce it accordingly!
- Real-Time Risk Monitoring:
New risks pop up every day, and attackers try to exploit them as soon as they can. Only by continuously monitoring risks can you quickly respond and mitigate them. Continuously monitoring risks also provides complete visibility into IT. So, swiftly detecting new risks will help you mitigate potential threats.
SanerNow continuously detects all types of security risks to ensure real-time risk monitoring. Powered by the world’s largest security intelligence, SanerNow is always up-to-date, allowing for much more precise risk detection and monitoring.
- Broader Risk Detection:
Your attack surface might be bigger than you think! Since it’s not just software vulnerabilities that are the point of attack. Hackers constantly exploit misconfigurations, exposures, posture anomalies, and missing patches. Consequently, broader risk detection will help you map your attack surface better and reduce it!
With its lightweight and multifunctional agents, SanerNow detects risks beyond CVEs, enabling better visibility and broader risk detection in a single unified dashboard. As a result, you understand your attack surface better and make the right reduction decisions.
- Effective Risk Prioritization:
Some parts of your attack surface are more prone to cyberattacks and need immediate attention. To reduce your attack surface faster, you must prioritize risks based on the CVSS score, business impact, exploitability, and other factors.
SanerNow leverages SSVC-based risk prioritization to prioritize risks based on how they impact your organization’s business and other important factors. Combined with its own proprietary prioritization, SanerNow does the job of quickly reducing the attack surface easily!
- Continuous and Speedy Patch Cycles:
Everybody applies patches, but when it’s applied matters. With the mean time to remediate a risk being 60 days, the attacker has enough time to exploit your attack surface. Continuously and quickly scanning for missing patches and applying them is critical to ensure you’re reducing the attack surface.
SanerNow, with its natively integrated remediation engine, automatically scans for missing patches, downloads, and tests and applies them on a timely basis. With SanerNow, you easily achieve continuous and speedy patch cycles to reduce the attack surface quickly.
- Automated Risk Remediation:
Risk remediation, the most important step to reduce the attack surface, can be cumbersome if done manually. By automating the risk remediation process, you can speed up your response time and reduce the attack surface faster. Integrated and automated vulnerability management tools can help you quickly apply patches or fixes.
You achieve automated risk remediation with SanerNow’s extensive scheduling, automation, and customization capabilities. You can automate SanerNow to detect, assess, prioritize, and remediate the risks based on various triggers. Further, you also select when you wish to perform the remediation action as well. - Network Segmentation
Network segmentation involves splitting your network into different sections that work independently. This way, you split and isolate your attack surface into smaller parts, minimizing the attack surface. Further, if a cyberattack does occur, only that network segment is at risk, and the rest of your network is safe.
SanerNow allows you to categorize your network in a completely customizable way. You can segment your network based on business functionality or risk appetite, make the physical changes, and drastically reduce the attack surface.
Other Strategies to Consider
- Zero Trust model:
Rising in popularity recently, the idea of the Zero Trust model is to provide only the bare minimum access to the required resources/devices. In this way, you reduce user privileges and significantly minimize the potential risks that could occur. Additionally, misuse of resources or data reduces as well. - Reduce Network Complexity:
While it sounds obvious, reducing your network’s complexity can significantly reduce your attack surface. Attackers try to exploit forgotten assets and devices to access your network. But by eliminating unnecessary devices, assets, and resources, you reduce the number of endpoints that could be at risk. - Implement Stringent Encryption:
Encryption is an important weapon you can leverage to reduce your attack surface extensively. By enforcing stringent encryption policies, you minimize the potential risk your devices face. It also acts as a fail-safe in case your defenses fail. Additionally, even the compliance regulations recommend the same too! - Employee Training and Awareness:
Often, it’s the human who is the weakest link in cybersecurity. Supporting it is the fact that most cyberattacks are due to human mistakes. Proper training, phishing simulations, and rewards can go a long way in reducing human errors and potential threats. Additionally, it makes users more accountable for their actions as well.
Supersonic Attack Surface Reduction with SanerNow CVEM
The attack surface has evolved over the years. So have attackers. It’s time you get an upgrade, too.
SanerNow Continuous Vulnerability & Exposure Management is an attack surface management solution that will reduce your attack surface by 5x! Natively integrated and completely automatable, SanerNow detects, assesses, prioritizes, and remediates risks to reduce your attack surface.
SanerNow can:
- Continuously detect and assess security risks in real-time
- Swiftly prioritize the detected risks
- Immediately patch them with integrated remediation
Want to know more, schedule a demo now!
