We recently hosted a session showcasing just how vulnerable the external attack surfaces of the majority of the financial industry really is –  we analyzed 25 Fortune 500, S&P, and FTSE 100 banks and their subsidiaries.

It wasn’t good. 

23% of Fortune 500, S&P and FTSE 100 banks had at least one exposed database with a potential data leakage.

54% of Fortune 500, S&P and FTSE 100 banks had RDPs exposed to the internet.

31% of Fortune 500, S&P and FTSE 100 banks had a vulnerability to Remote Code Execution.

76% of Fortune 500, S&P and FTSE 100 banks had a critical security issue that could result in data exposure.

It’s a scary world, but there are always ways to mitigate risk and exposure to your company.

We rounded up some basic essentials of external attack surface management to share to help you get started on the path of protecting your company against vulnerability exposure for a secure IT network.

3 things to know about external attack surface management:

What are the best solutions for SMBs who want to protect their vulnerability exposure without ‘fortune 500’ budgets?

The most important step for any business regardless of size is cyber security awareness training across the entire company. 

97% of IT Leaders Say Insider Data Breaches are due to employee errors and inside threats, so it’s a team effort to minimize exposure.

Among security teams in SMBs, there is a tendency to underestimate the importance of managing their external attack surface. Too many believe that using asset management tools or vulnerability management platforms “is enough for now”. But this prevailing and misleading assumption can corrupt your network infrastructure, lead to serious data breaches and security incidents like the massive attack that hit the European Central Bank in October 2020. This can result in costing your organization a couple of million dollars. Something the majority of SMBs cannot afford.

Security teams need to defend their external attack surface beyond the assessment of risk and exposure. Security team must continually monitor their IT infrastructure.

How can companies discover unofficial or unknown assets to minimize exposure?

Most companies don’t have the resources or the cyber security expertise to handle this in-house. So, it’s vital that external solutions implemented have end to end asset discovery abilities.

Full scope asset discovery happens in 2 concurrent steps:

#1: Continuous mapping of the internet 

Reposify uses our infrastructure and engines across 50+ global locations. This holistic approach helps us identify both IPv4 and IPv6IP addresses scattered around the internet. 

#2: Mapping the organization’s IT network

Generating end-to-end blueprints of your organization’s assets, including every connected device, network and system are non-negotiable. Reposify maps the official network infrastructure of your organization, including your domains and any official registrar associated with your network and generates digital signatures for every asset in your inventory for accurate classification. Using these signatures we cross-correlate to find any unknown assets associated with your IT ecosystem, known and – pay attention – unknown assets. Reposify’s cutting-edge technology combined with our approach of continuous internet mapping provides full network visibility of external attack surfaces.

What type of security issues do companies need to be aware of?

There are a wide range of risks and security issues that can pose a major threat to your organization’s IT network. 

The exposure of unknown assets, vulnerable software of any kind, authentication risks, misconfiguration risks, access control issues, phishing attempts, encryption risks, denial of service (DDoS), expired SSL certificates risks, potential domain takeovers and the list of risks goes on. 

Resposify’s team of cyber security experts can do what hackers do – generate any company’s entire internet-facing asset inventory and ecosystem map with no input required from your side. 

Scary in the wrong hands, a saving grace in the right ones.

Reposify integrates with the NIST framework which continuously covers all the known CVEs and CWEs out there. 

Our advanced technology also classifies the issues whether it’s in the development, testing, or production environment. This enables the platform to assess the severity of the security issue and to prioritize it for security teams for maximum efficiency.

Contact our cyber experts today at [email protected], to learn more about Reposify’s external attack surface management solution.