Securing the mind-bogglingly fast expansion of your organization’s digital presence caused by setting up a remote staff may seem overwhelming—especially considering the boom in internet-exposed assets already happening over the past decade.
Businesses have been undergoing a digital transformation demanding rapid migration to the cloud and expanded adoption of web, mobile, and social platforms. These initiatives, which expand organizations’ digital presence far across the internet, are badly exposing the limitations of network security controls like firewalls, DLP, and network monitoring. According to the Verizon Data Breach report, external-facing web applications, into which network security tools lack visibility, comprised the vector category most commonly exploited in hacking-related breaches.
This digital transformation, already challenging long-held views of cybersecurity, was sent into hyperdrive by COVID-19. Almost overnight, workforces and business operations were decentralized and flung all over the world even farther than before, widening protection gaps and turning security protocols on their heads. Personnel, now forced to work from home, moved the edges of their organization’s digital attack surfaces along with them.
To put the sheer scale of what security teams are now tasked with defending into perspective, we analyzed RiskIQ’s internet-wide telemetry and massive internet data collection to reveal the true extent of the modern corporate digital attack surface. In our latest research, ‘Analysis of an Attack Surface,’ we’ll highlight five areas that we feel help to frame the challenges faced in going beyond network security controls to discovering unknowns outside the firewall.
Excerpt of the report
All five of these areas underline a need to extend security programs outside the perimeter to foster a more informed approach in this new age of cyber defense.
Report highlights include:
1. The Global Attack Surface is much bigger than you think: RiskIQ observed 2,959,498 new domains (211,392 per day) and 772,786,941 new hosts (55,199,067) across the internet over two weeks, each representing a possible target for threat actors.
2. Sometimes hackers know more about your attack surface than you do: Looking at the attack surfaces of FTSE-30 companies, each organization had, on average, 324 expired certificates and 46 Web frameworks with known vulnerabilities.
3. The hidden attack surface: In Q1 2020, RiskIQ identified 21,496 phishing domains across 478 unique brands.
4. The mobile attack surface: In 2019, RiskIQ discovered 170,796 blacklisted mobile apps across 120 mobile app stores and the open internet.
5. JavaScript Threats: – A New Frontier of Cybercrime: So far, in 2020, RiskIQ has detected 2,552 Magecart attacks or 425 instances of Magecart per month.
For the full insights and analysis, download the full report here: https://www.riskiq.com/research/analysis-of-an-attack-surface/
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Article Link: https://www.riskiq.com/blog/external-threat-management/analysis-attack-surface/