Attack Surface Management (ASM)

What is Attack Surface Management (ASM)?

Definition
Attack Surface Management (ASM) is the continuous discovery, monitoring, and management of all internet-facing assets that could be exploited by attackers. It provides visibility into known, unknown, and shadow IT resources that make up an organization’s external attack surface.

Why it matters
Digital transformation and cloud adoption have expanded the attack surface dramatically. Unmanaged or forgotten assets create opportunities for threat actors. ASM helps organizations identify these exposures before they can be exploited.

How it works
ASM platforms use automated scanning, DNS analysis, and intelligence correlation to uncover assets associated with your domain, subsidiaries, and vendors. Findings are prioritized based on risk context—such as exposure level, configuration issues, and associated vulnerabilities.

How Brinqa helps
Effectively managing your attack surface in this sea of millions of vulnerabilities combined with the ever-changing nature of cyber threats and siloed teams leveraging disconnected security tools requires three critical capabilities: unified asset management, risk-based security management, and comprehensive cyber hygiene. With Brinqa, organizations gain visibility into cyber assets across their entire attack surface. Building and visualizing their baseline Cyber Risk Graph empowers true risk-based vulnerability management programs and effective security posture management.

Unified Asset Inventory

Building your Cyber Risk Graph establishes visualization and understanding of your attack surface, connecting all asset types, business context, and security controls into a single graph-based view. Brinqa consolidates asset definitions of network infrastructure, devices, apps, cloud, IoT, and OT from CMDBs and security tools into a unified profile per asset. Each asset profile combines data from every source for an enriched profile that establishes definitive ownership of the asset. Security tools (e.g., vulnerability scanners) that didn’t know about the asset are reconciled through the Cyber Risk Graph, improving the effectiveness of your security controls.

Leveraging this unified asset inventory and associating security controls enforced on assets with business context enables the identification of gaps in your security posture and is crucial to reducing attackers’ ability to identify and exploit vulnerabilities. Brinqa Cyber Risk Graph underpins your unified asset inventory, empowers organizations to understand their complete attack surface, and is foundational to risk prioritization and security posture management.

Risk Prioritization

Making your cybersecurity programs and tools risk-based improves the organization’s ability to assess the impact, likelihood and cost of vulnerability exploitation so you can focus on fixing what matters. Brinqa activates the Cyber Risk Graph of your attack surface by combining risk factors related to business context, security findings, and threat intelligence into a company-wide view of cyber risk.

Prioritize what matters

• Best practice-based risk modeling and a scalable compute engine turn highly interrelated and configurable risk factors into scores that measure risk. The resulting risk scores are normalized across your entire attack surface and are entirely unique to your business.
• Orchestrated flows increase the effectiveness of remediation processes through intelligent ticketing, automated creation of tickets, and dynamic enforcement of SLAs.

Prioritizing security findings and vulnerabilities based on risk across your organization while automating remediation reduces your attack surface.

Cyber Hygiene

A strong security posture is achieved and maintained by evaluating cyber hygiene across your entire attack surface. Continuously monitoring security control coverage and eff ectiveness, while consistently reporting on security initiatives’ return on investment (ROI) improves cyber hygiene. With Brinqa, organizations quickly identify gaps in applying critical security policies and controls across their Cyber Risk Graph. They validate and track the effectiveness of risk remediation processes and prove the reduction of their attack surface, risk, and the number of vulnerabilities in an environment.

The powerful Brinqa Query Language enables easy access to the answers to the most complicated security questions — am I implementing the proper security controls? Are they being applied across my entire attack surface? Are they working?

To see the Brinqa Attack Surface Intelligence Platform in action, request a demo with a Brinqa Expert.