Security Weekly Interview: What’s Holding Attack Surface Management Back?

Attack Surface Management: What’s the mystery?

The concept of the attack surface is almost as old as cybersecurity itself. So why do so many companies still struggle with attack surface management? Why is what should be a foundational element of any good security program so often an afterthought, if thought about at all?

It’s not like the challenge of protecting an organization is getting any easier. Quite the opposite: the rise of the cloud and remote work means that networks have become far more complex, with thousands or even millions of assets exposed to the internet. As a result, organizations don’t know what they don’t know, creating blind spots in protection that can be leveraged by attackers.

The issue is that the security industry, by and large, continues to evolve incrementally, leaving it years behind other areas of the tech industry like Google and AWS, and even further behind sophisticated, ever-evolving cybercriminals. Why? Because the technology required to solve the challenge of attack surface management was until recently cost-prohibitive, in addition to being difficult to scale for most organizations.

Why attack surface monitoring needs to run across the entire infrastructure

However, that’s no longer the case. In an interview with Security Weekly, CyCognito CEO Rob Gurzeev explains that the technology now exists to ensure effective attack surface management. It’s now up to CISOs to understand the risks and adopt tools that are up to the task of properly managing the attack surface.

“No combination of network port scanners, CVE scanners and the like can solve the problem,” he said. “You have to leverage technologies like NLP and machine learning to automatically, at scale, find third-party components, your subsidiary’s assets and the millions of assets you’ve got around the world and contextualize the risk.”

During this wide-ranging discussion, Rob shares valuable insight into why attack surface monitoring needs to run across the entire infrastructure – not just open ports – so you can find the exploitable assets that create the greatest risk before a potential attacker gets the chance. You’ll also get to hear directly from Rob about why and how the CyCognito platform was designed to take the perspective of an attacker so you can get the complete external attack surface visibility you need to prioritize risks and accelerate remediation. Click the link above to hear Rob!