Blog

Level Up Digital Asset Management

Posted: 10th August 2022
By: Ellen Wilson
Blog Post - Level Up Digital Asset Management

In just a decade, the attack surface has grown by a factor of ten. The threat landscape expands rapidly – while the number of cyber attacks are unprecedented with continually shifting tactics. To effectively protect your organization and its digital assets, you need to identify emerging threats – wherever they originate – and understand the complete storyline of an attack. This requires insights into adversaries and their intent, their infrastructure, and their targets: the attack surfaces of organizations.

What Should You Know?

The era when it was easy to know where all your digital assets are is over. Most organizations have digital assets spread across the internet. Frequently, digital assets can be spun up without proper security oversight – and then left forgotten and unsecured. You need to be able to monitor all of it, no matter where your digital assets may be hiding. You can’t defend what you can’t see. So, to reduce risk, organizations need an outside-in view of their attack surface, mentions across different channels, and all vulnerabilities. By connecting brand protection and attack surface management programs, organizations can accelerate incident response investigations, supercharge vulnerability scanning, and confidently reduce risk.

With brand protection solutions, organizations gain an understanding of how their brand is perceived and discussed externally. External attack surface management is a natural complement to brand protection, by providing insights into how the brand manifests externally, including references to different products, brand names, domains, subdomains, and more. By combining brand protection and external attack surface management, organizations level-up digital asset management with an unmatched view of the external attack surface in order to meet and surpass the challenges they’re facing right now.

What Do You Need?

But what do you actually need to get there? Not all external attack surface management solutions are equal.

  • It needs to be comprehensive. With a unified view of its external infrastructure, an organization can navigate across disparate technology systems to quickly map and resolve vulnerabilities, while keeping pace with its dynamic attack surface. This requires a complete understanding of their attack surface with a real-time snapshot, as well as a historical view, of all on-premise and cloud-based assets on the internet.

  • It needs to provide context. It is critical for teams to avoid rabbit-hole, waste of time, investigations on old asset registrations. Attack surface management solutions find unknown assets, but many are unverifiable, and haven't been active in a while. Context is key, so that teams are able to properly prioritize and remediate risks with up-to-date, trusted information.

  • It needs to supercharge your digital asset management. Digital asset management sits at the intersection of external attack surface management and brand protection. The combination of the two levels up features like digital footprinting and data leakage detection. You need an attack surface management solution that can connect to your larger security program, providing you with a comprehensive view of your threat landscape from a single platform.

  • It needs to maintain persistent coverage. Your brand and its digital assets are going to change over time. Attack surface management solutions stop being useful if they can’t keep up with the changes. Continuous scanning of the internet for digital assets keeps your understanding of the attack surface fresh.

How Can We Help?

Recorded Future Attack Surface Intelligence offers a comprehensive, outside-in, intelligence-driven view of your organization. With over ten years of historical data and deep context on hostnames, domains, IPs, SSL certificates, and more, Attack Surface Intelligence provides a continuous and uninterrupted scan of the internet for digital assets, covering everything from cloud-services to external-facing infrastructure. This provides a persistent and up-to-date understanding of your attack surface landscape with real-time risk scoring for more confident identification and management of assets.

Once you have identified the assets related to your organization, Brand Intelligence can then monitor for mentions of those assets, alerting you in real-time as threats to your brand emerge. For example, Attack Surface Intelligence may uncover a forgotten domain owned by your organization. With Brand Intelligence, you can then monitor in real-time for mentions or typosquats of that domain. If a typosquat is discovered, Brand Intelligence provides insights into how and when that domain was weaponized, what phishing host IPs are associated with it, and recommended actions for taking down and resolving the threat to the organization.

With the combined power of Attack Surface Intelligence and Brand Intelligence, organizations are able to level-up their digital asset management with a comprehensive and proactive solution for identifying and remediating threats.

To learn more about how Recorded Future can support your digital asset management program, watch this on-demand webinar Digital Asset Management in an Expanding Attack Surface.

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