External attack surface is all the possible Internet-based entry points that an attacker can abuse to compromise an organization. This can include Internet-facing assets in traditional on-premise datacenters, co-location environments, cloud services providers, corporate subsidiaries, cloud-based SAAS applications, and trusted 3rd party and partner networks.
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Because an organization's attack surface continuously changes with time, a process for monitoring and identifying possible Internet exposures that could lead to a compromise is critical. The continuous process of asset discovery, asset classification, risk identification, and ultimately risk reduction, is known as attack surface management.
46% of cybersecurity decision-makers say that continually monitoring security posture is their biggest cyber-risk management challenge (Source: ESG)
80% of Internet-facing honeypots are compromised within 24 hours of deployment demonstrating how quickly insecure services on the Internet are compromised (Source: Palo Alto Networks)
70% of breaches are perpetrated by external threat actors. (Source: Verizon)
Digital transformation has completely redefined an organization's modern digital footprint. The security challenges presented by the proliferation of an organization's assets spread all across the Internet has been further compounded by the rapid adoption of SAAS, cloud, and devops technologies. These technologies have not only expanded the attack surface footprint of an organization, but they have also created a moving target by exponentially increasing the rate of change seen in modern digital environments as assets spin up, down, and move around. And as organizations' attack surface dramatically grows and rapidly changes, the rise in. opportunistic attacks, such as ransomware, has further exacerbated the problem.
The recent log4j vulnerability was a testament to how important it is to understand your attack surface. Most companies scrambled to identify vulnerable java applications and 3rd party OEM software in their environments. Very few had a mapping of where their assets were, what they were running, and their level of exposure. This just-in-time discovery process dramatically extended the patch cycles time and turned the event into a bigger fire drill than it needed to be.
Legacy attack surface management platforms simply enumerate and classify assets, but they do not attempt to quantify the risk of exposure, prioritize work, or provide workstreams that move a security team towards action and resolution. Staring at the legacy ASM analytics, you're often left with the question, "Yes, but so what?"
Burned out and understaffed security teams do not need yet another product that just dumps more work in their laps. Before any ticket is created, our offensive security operators will manually verify that a potential exposure is both real and of major concern. We take on the burden of investigation and verification and the removal of false positives. Our security operators also act as a direct extension of your team by sitting alongside your security team in Slack or team channels where they can alert on critical risks, discuss mitigation strategies, and validate remediation efforts.
Product-only attack surface management platforms do not have the offensive security brain trust. Our red teams give the Chariot product team access to the most cutting-edge attack techniques that modern adversaries leverage. Exploiting the virtuous cycle between offensive expertise and product automation, our platform rapidly implements new techniques into the Chariot platform well before product-only companies are even aware that new attack techniques exist.
Many attack surface management platforms argue that the outside-in point-of-view that an attacker shares is the only perspective that really matters. As a company that has provided offensive security capabilities to our customers for over a decade and that is composed of former NSA TAO and CIA operators, we strongly disagree. We directly integrate with your cloud environments, source code managers, container registries, and cl/cd pipelines to be made aware of environmental changes and new assets before the attackers do.