Guest blog courtesy of RiskProfiler.The tactics used by the cybercriminals have evolved by leaps and bounds in the last decade. In correspondence to the perpetual evolution of AI technology, the breach techniques have become much more sophisticated, invasive, and stealthy, making the detection and remediation process complex once they reach inside the system. Thus, it is imperative for the MSSP and enterprises to implement strong external attack surface monitoring protocols to secure the digital ecosystem before attackers can exploit it.The external threat intelligence tools conduct all these processes in real-time, even before your endpoint alerts can be triggered or assets can be compromised.
— Setu Parimi, CTO, RiskProfilerSecure your digital infrastructure against attacks and vulnerabilities with real-time monitoring and contextual insights.
The MSSP Blind Spot: The Risk of Unseen Vulnerabilities
Managed security service providers often excel at monitoring logs, endpoints, and internal networks in a client ecosystem. However, the modern attack surface is not confined within perimeter defenses but spread across cloud environments, third-party services, shadow IT assets, and abandoned domains. Such external threats often do not stem from the most obvious security incidents, but from the vulnerabilities overlooked by security teams due to a lack of context or assets invisible to their security checks.These external threat signals are often also overlooked by the traditional threat detection tools, firewalls, or security integration, and even management or SIEM platforms. Delaying threat detection and related mitigation allows these threat exposures to fester, and once located by external adversaries; they make paths leading to your most coveted business assets.External Threat Intelligence: A Proactive Solution for What Doesn’t Trigger Your Alerts
As mentioned earlier, a simple forgotten cloud asset, a misconfigured S3 bucket, or a leaked credential is enough to grant external actors access to your operations, database, and sensitive information. When attackers exploit these assets to gain entry, they do so without triggering the major alert system. It happens with subtle and seemingly inconsequential changes that appear almost harmless to your security team. However, tying these changes together with contextual information helps your security engineers see the picture that might be overlooked by others.That is how External Attack Surface Intelligence excels. EASM platforms like RiskProfiler help you access comprehensive threat insights across your attack surface, cloud infrastructure, supply chain risks, dark web, social media mentions, vulnerability updates, and compliance failures. These insights are presented, analyzed, prioritized, and mitigated following a few steps.- Continuous Attack Surface Monitoring: The external threat intelligence tools monitor your attack surface continuously to detect any signs of threat signals or exposures emerging on your immediate extended digital infrastructure.
- Proactive Threat Detection: The tools then diagnose the findings to locate common exposures and system vulnerabilities, such as cloud misconfigurations, stale API, suspicious traffic requests, exposed public code repositories, abandoned or exposed assets on the supply chain, etc.
- Threat Analysis & Attack Paths Mapping: Once the risk data is collected, the EASM platforms, like RiskProfiler, map the attack paths by chaining the existing exposures and vulnerabilities to simulate how attackers might enter and move through your digital ecosystem in a real-life scenario.
- Threat Prioritization & Severity Scoring: These attack surface management tools not only help you discover the exposures and path of lateral movement, but also assign grades based on their business impact and technical severity, enabling your team to focus on concerns that should be your top priority.
Shadow Assets & Phishing Infrastructure: The Two Horsemen of Cyber Apocalypse
Phishing kits and shadow IT structures are among the biggest concerns for modern security teams. In cloud environments, it is insanely simple to spin up new assets by any of the organizational employees without having to inform the IT or security team. When your HR or marketing team integrates unapproved SaaS platforms for productivity and convenience, or your development team abandons test environments, forgoing pre-approved protocols, they do not vanish into the system but stay outside of the system until they are detected as the source of intrusion during post-attack investigation.Similarly, modern phishing kits not only exploit the confusion between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets but also utilize AI’s ability to fine-tune replicated assets to perfection in a way that even the most attentive person fails to identify the differences.In such a scenario, EASM platforms with OSINT and peer-intelligence update the asset inventory regularly, detect shadow infrastructure without delay, allowing you to remediate exposure before it can be exploited. These tools also detect phishing kits with pixel analysis, behavioral analytics, and investigating deviation from usual brand communication styles.Real-World Example: The Missed Subdomain That Led to Compromise
The abandoned subdomains can be a major entry point during cyber attacks, and a major US retailer realized it in the last week. As part of their last year’s black friday marketing campaign, their marketing team created a subdomain for a cleaner workflow and easy measurements. However, this profitable campaign nullified the initial gains when the abandoned asset was exploited by threat actors to enter their ecosystem.This is, however, could have been easily avoided if the MSSP managing its security posture had integrated an external threat detection and management tool. The integration would have maintained an inventory of all assets, including the subdomain, detected the possible exposures and path of lateral movement, allowing immediate response and help prevent the attack scenario.How Does RiskProfiler External Threat Intelligence Empower MSSPs?
RiskProfiler empowers your MSSP SOC team with real-time visibility, threat correlation, contextual analysis, and real-time alerts to maintain continuous vigilance across the attack surface. It monitors exposures on your attack surface, vulnerabilities in your supply chain, cloud misconfigurations, phishing kits, and data or credential leaks in the dark web with contextual information and remediation insights. Address attack signals with rapid detection to avoid exposure and attacker exploitation of our client system.Final Thought: Your Cyber Vigilante for Threat Control
The modern cyberattack trends cannot be fought with reactive defense. In fast fast-growing cloud structure, assets are integrated every minute, and adversaries are well aware of that. To fortify your ecosystem against such a volatile environment, you need external threat intelligence to detect vulnerabilities before attackers do. Before, in most cases, offense is the best defense.“Defenders who only monitor internal networks are always two steps behind. External visibility is the real early warning system.”— Setu Parimi, CTO, RiskProfilerSecure your digital infrastructure against attacks and vulnerabilities with real-time monitoring and contextual insights.
