Post Syndicated from Michael Chroney original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/03/10/seeing-the-whole-picture-a-better-way-to-manage-your-attack-surface/

Do you trust your view of your organization’s risk?

With cloud adoption, remote work, shadow IT, and AI, security teams face an overwhelming challenge: scoping their attack surface and continuously discovering all assets and exposures before threats emerge. This aligns with the critical first steps of a Continuous Threat Exposure Management Program (CTEM), which emphasizes the importance of scoping and discovery.

This visibility gap has significant consequences. In 2024, 14% of breaches happened because attackers exploited vulnerabilities to gain initial access — that’s almost triple the amount from 2023 (Verizon DBIR 2024). This isn’t surprising when you consider that only 17% of organizations feel confident that they can find and list at least 95% of their assets, according to Gartner Innovation Insight: Attack Surface Management 2024 research. Without a clear plan for scoping and discovery, organizations can’t effectively secure their assets because they don’t know what they’re trying to protect.

If you don’t have a complete picture of your entire IT estate — inclusive of internal and external facing assets — you’re going to miss vulnerabilities and leave openings that attackers can exploit. That’s why it’s so important to continuously scan and discover your assets so that you always have an accurate, up-to-date view of your attack surface. This is where tools like external attack surface management (EASM) and cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) come into play because they give you a single view of everything you have and can highlight what’s exposed. Gaining this visibility will help your security teams proactively detect, prioritize, and remediate threats before they are exploited.

Why you need a complete view of your attack surface

Let’s face it, as organizations grow, their potential vulnerabilities grow right along with them. This creates complexity for security teams who are already struggling to keep up. They’ve tried to solve this by adding more and more security tools, but this often backfires and creates a fragmented view that makes it harder to see the whole picture.

To truly reduce risk and strengthen your defenses, you need a unified approach that combines EASM and CAASM.

Even organizations who embrace EASM or CAASM may end up with a disjointed security toolset. Many organizations try to manage their attack surface with either an EASM, a CAASM, or other separate tools, but this often results in an incomplete view of the attack surface, creating blind spots and leading to missed vulnerabilities. This fragmented approach also fails to identify critical control gaps. For example, if an asset is not visible, it might be overlooked that it lacks an endpoint agent or is not protected by a firewall.

Why EASM or CAASM alone fall short

EASM solutions are highly effective for monitoring internet-facing assets, including web applications, cloud services, and third-party integrations. However, they cannot provide visibility into internal environments that are not publicly accessible. This includes non-internet-facing components of on-prem infrastructure, privileged systems, and certain shadow IT assets.

CAASM solutions provide internal visibility, aggregating data from security tools, asset inventories, and IT management systems. They’re great at identifying misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and security gaps within an organization’s controlled environment. However, CAASM tools can’t account for external exposures, leaving an incomplete picture of how attackers could gain initial access. Additionally, CAASM solutions are completely reliant on 3rd party tools and integrations, meaning that you are adding yet another tool to your tech stack that you have to pay for and manage.

Disparate tools, disjointed defense

To secure growing attack surfaces, many organizations rely on a mix of vulnerability management, cloud security posture management (CSPM), and application scanners. However, these tools often operate independently, leading to fragmented visibility and inefficiencies. Without a single source of truth, security teams struggle to correlate risks, resulting in missed threats, duplicate efforts, and slower response times. Managing multiple tools also increases alert fatigue and operational overhead, while leaving critical gaps in attack surface coverage.

Are you sensing a trend here?

The power of a unified view

A truly effective risk management strategy needs more than a bunch of different tools — it needs those tools to work together seamlessly, giving you a complete picture of all your assets and potential exposures. Security teams need one single source of truth that brings together data from all of their vulnerability management solutions. This will ensure that teams can:

• Strengthen Security Through Visibility

You have to know and trust what assets you have, where they are, and how they might be exposed. This is key to enforcing proper access controls, patching vulnerabilities, and applying the right security measures to your assets. With a full inventory, teams can be sure that no device, application, or cloud instance is left unprotected.

• Manage Risk Across Your Entire Attack Surface

A unified approach lets security teams prioritize the most critical risks across all digital environments, greatly reducing blind spots. With a unified view, organizations can detect patterns, understand attack paths, and proactively close security gaps before attackers can exploit them.

By integrating all of your exposure management capabilities into a single, centralized system, your organization can move from reactive security measures to a proactive and holistic approach — giving you the confidence to effectively defend against modern threats.

Take command of your attack surface

The threat landscape is constantly shifting, and it’s more important than ever to have a complete and accurate view of your attack surface. It’s time for security teams to ask some tough questions: Do we really have the insight we need to protect our organization? Are there blind spots that attackers could take advantage of? These questions are at the heart of the scoping and discovery phases within a CTEM program, prompting organizations to continuously evaluate and improve their attack surface visibility.

To get ahead of threats, organizations should simplify their security approach by reducing the number of tools they’re using and find a solution that seamlessly combines EASM and CAASM. A unified view helps security teams find, prioritize, and reduce risks more effectively.

How Rapid7 can help

Rapid7 recently announced Exposure Command and Surface Command, the first two solutions launched on the new Command Platform. Surface Command provides complete visibility across internal and external environments by combining EASM and CAASM in a single solution, allowing security teams to view and prioritize high-risk assets across their entire environment. Exposure Command builds on Surface Command’s attack surface visibility, offering proactive exposure mitigation and remediation prioritization across your hybrid environment.

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/02/25/uncovering-and-protecting-sensitive-data-across-cloud-environments-with-exposure-command/

Modern organizations grapple with the complex task of securing sensitive data in sprawling hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Due to insufficient visibility and governance, data is often misplaced, duplicated, or left exposed. This fragmented environment makes it difficult for teams to accurately assess data exposure risks, comply with stringent privacy regulations, and continuously track sensitive data across locations, owners, and usage.

Without a consistent, holistic view of where sensitive data resides and how it is managed, organizations face significant security, compliance, and operational risks. To solve this challenge and make sense of their data security posture, organizations typically start by discovering and gaining visibility into data stored across their IT estate and work to classify the type of data and associated risk of exposure.

Modern enterprises typically rely on various data classification sources, including CSP-native detection services (such as Amazon Macie, MSFT Defender for Cloud, or GCP Security Command Center), third-party DSPM tools, custom classification policies, or by manually tagging native cloud resources. When discrepancies arise, security teams face a critical question: Which classification should they trust and how can they manage these classifications efficiently at scale? To help solve this persistent challenge, we’re excited to announce sensitive data discovery and data-centric risk prioritization in Exposure Command, empowering teams to implement data-centric risk prioritization as a cornerstone of their security strategy.

Automated Data Classification Leveraging Existing Tagging Frameworks

With this update, Exposure Command offers teams the ability to ingest data classifications and findings from native data security services offered by cloud providers such as AWS Macie, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Google Cloud Security Command Center. This enhancement enables organizations to centralize sensitive data insights across their cloud environments, providing a unified view of data risks and exposures. By leveraging these integrations, security teams can automate data classification ingestion, enhance risk assessment, and take proactive remediation steps to secure sensitive information in their cloud infrastructures.

We don’t just stop at support for native services, however, as we also offer the ability to ingest tags directly, whether from the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) or via IaC templates such as Terraform. With automated cloud-native tagging, organizations can establish a single source of truth for data classification, ensuring that security teams can quickly assess and respond to risks tied to sensitive information.

By taking a tag-based classification strategy, organizations can:

• Standardize classification across cloud resources with custom tag schemas for severity, data type, and compliance requirements.
• Ensure consistency by automating tag propagation across related resources.
• Leverage version control to track classification changes over time for audit and compliance purposes.

Infrastructure as Code Integration for Seamless Classification

Exposure Command makes it easy to implement and enforce consistent data classification directly within cloud infrastructure deployment workflows. With native Terraform resource tagging, automated tag inheritance, and customizable classification schemas, security teams can automate classification at scale. Version control ensures auditability and change tracking, helping organizations maintain a dynamic, risk-aware classification framework that evolves with their cloud environment.

Sensitive Data Discovery Meets Risk Prioritization

Exposure Command enables teams to take a data-centric approach to risk prioritization by incorporating insights into sensitive data exposures alongside Layered Context and Attack Path Analysis, ensuring that organizations focus on the risks that could lead to real-world breaches. By layering asset criticality, exploitability, and risk posture with insights into sensitive data exposure, security teams can focus on protecting crown jewel data assets.

Taking a Data-Centric Approach to Risk Prioritization with Layered Context

Layered Context is a multi-dimensional risk prioritization model that moves beyond traditional vulnerability management by integrating sensitive data insights, threat intelligence, and business impact analysis into a unified view of risk. Rather than prioritizing based solely on CVSS scores, this approach ensures security teams focus on the exposures that pose the highest real-world risk, not just those that appear severe on paper.

By layering in sensitive data awareness, Exposure Command allows teams to see not just which systems are vulnerable, but which ones expose high-value data whether it’s customer PII, financial records, intellectual property, or regulated information. This makes it possible to prioritize remediation based on both exploitability and potential business impact.

Understanding Paths for Lateral Movement and Unwanted Access to Sensitive Data

Attackers don’t just exploit vulnerabilities – they chain weaknesses together to reach high-value data. Exposure Command’s Attack Path Analysis goes beyond simply identifying risky assets; it maps how an attacker could move through the environment to access sensitive data. By visualizing lateral movement opportunities, privilege escalation paths, and gaps in data protection, security teams can preemptively block attack routes before they’re exploited.

Instead of just highlighting vulnerable systems, it maps how attackers could exploit weaknesses to access sensitive customer information, financial records, or intellectual property. This data-centric approach shifts remediation from a focus on CVSS scores to business impact-driven security, ensuring that teams address the most critical exposures first.

By revealing hidden exploitation paths, Exposure Command identifies chained vulnerabilities, lateral movement risks, and privilege escalation opportunities that could allow attackers to reach high-value data. A misconfiguration on a low-risk asset might seem harmless – until it’s linked to a cloud storage bucket containing sensitive data. With attack path visualization, security teams can better understand attack scenarios, block lateral movement, and proactively shut down high-risk pathways before they can be exploited – moving from reactive patching to proactive breach prevention.

Why Data-Centric Risk Prioritization Matters

Traditional risk management often overlooks the nuances of sensitive data exposure, relying on static vulnerability metrics. By embedding sensitive data insights directly into risk prioritization workflows, Rapid7 Exposure Command shifts the paradigm to focus on what matters most: safeguarding critical data assets.

This approach ensures that security efforts are aligned with business priorities, enabling organizations to:

• Protect customer and proprietary information.
• Mitigate the risk of data breaches and non-compliance penalties.
• Enhance collaboration between security, IT, and risk management teams.

Take Command of Your Sensitive Data Risks

With sensitive data discovery now part of Exposure Command, Rapid7 is empowering organizations to bolster their security strategies. Whether you’re a financial institution safeguarding customer data or a healthcare provider ensuring patient privacy, this innovation provides the tools you need to protect what matters most.

Ready to elevate your risk management program? Learn how Rapid7 Exposure Command can help you integrate data-centric risk prioritization into your security operations.

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/02/25/command-platform-innovations-eliminate-data-blind-spots-through-complete-visibility-and-context-driven-risk-prioritization/

Rapid7 provides unmatched attack surface visibility through the Command Platform, helping security teams identify, prioritize, and remediate risk across hybrid environments. Surface Command is the only solution available that combines native external and internal scanning into a single unified view of your attack surface, enriched with telemetry from third party security and ITOps tools via more than 120 out-of-the-box connectors.

Exposure Command builds on this foundational attack surface visibility, layering on adversary-aware risk prioritization and integrated remediation workflows that make it easy for security teams to anticipate where attackers are going to target, pinpoint their most pressing exposures and act swiftly and collaboratively to address issues before they can be exploited.

Now, we’re taking this a step further with three key innovations designed to strengthen risk prioritization, streamline remediation, and ensure sensitive data remains protected.

Expanding Already Unmatched Attack Surface Visibility and Context to Sensitive Data

Sensitive data is a prime target for attackers, yet security teams often struggle to track where it resides and how exposed it is. Sensitive Data Discovery in Exposure Command delivers continuous visibility into sensitive data across multicloud environments, ensuring that security teams can proactively protect high-value assets.

With native ingestion from CSP security services like AWS Macie, GCP DLP, and Microsoft Defender, as well as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tagging support, security teams can classify sensitive data from the start, eliminating manual, error-prone processes and improving data hygiene.

These insights feed directly into our risk scoring and prioritization methodology, with sensitive data insights woven directly into Layered Context and Attack Path Analysis, enabling teams to identify and focus on the exposures that put sensitive information at risk.

Improving Program Efficiency and Efficacy with AI-driven Vulnerability Scoring

The exponential growth of vulnerabilities has outpaced the ability of vendors and agencies like NVD to provide timely CVSS scores. This leaves security teams struggling to assess the severity of vulnerabilities, particularly with the volume of CVEs escalating rapidly. To bridge this gap, we’re introducing AI-driven CVSS scoring, a powerful capability that leverages an advanced machine learning model to:

• Analyze vulnerability data from trusted sources and historical expert assessments
• Generate accurate, intelligence-driven CVSS scores to fill in vendor and agency gaps
• Feed into our Active Risk scoring model to help security teams cut through the noise and make informed decisions faster and with confidence

With this innovation, the accuracy of Active Risk scores have improved by 17%, ensuring greater consistency and actionable insights. The model’s predictive capabilities achieve a remarkable 87% accuracy in severity classification, making it an indispensable tool in today’s fast-evolving threat environment.

Streamlined Remediation with Surface Command and Remediation Hub

Security teams don’t just need to find risks. They need to fix them, and fix them fast, but it’s usually not within their purview to actually take the ultimate action to resolve the issue at its root. Security teams often need to communicate with stakeholders across the organization – often on the infrastructure or DevOps teams – to convince them that there is a pressing risk that needs their attention.

Overcoming this burden of proof – because it’s often not a simple task to convince others around the organization to share your sense of urgency – can be challenging to say the least. In order to clear that hurdle, it requires irrefutable evidence with clarifying context to inspire action.

Our newly-expanded Surface Command and Remediation Hub integration ensures that remediation guidance is embedded directly within asset inventory and detail pages, eliminating the need to switch between platforms to gather and share the contextual information needed to address risk fast.

By deepening the integration between Surface Command and Remediation Hub, security teams benefit from:

• Faster mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) by bringing prioritized remediation guidance directly into the asset inventory and detail pages within Surface Command
• Deeper asset context at the time of remediation, including insights from third-party security and ITOps tooling
• Improved collaboration by providing security teams and stakeholders with enriched context for quicker decision-making

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Rapid7’s approach combines cutting-edge technology and comprehensive data insights to help organizations focus on what truly matters. By addressing high-impact risks and safeguarding critical assets, teams can reduce their exposure to threats while improving operational efficiency.

Rapid7’s enhanced platform capabilities empower organizations to modernize their risk management strategies. By integrating sensitive data insights, leveraging GenAI-driven prioritization, and expanding remediation workflows, we provide the tools you need to stay ahead of threats and proactively eliminate exposures across your entire attack surface.

This strategy also streamlines collaboration, enabling security, IT, and risk management teams to work together seamlessly with shared context and priorities. Ultimately, aligning risk management practices with real-world threats and business objectives ensures greater resilience and security.

Learn how Rapid7 can help you adopt a threat-aware approach to threat and exposure management. It’s time to transform your security strategy and protect what matters most.

Post Syndicated from Emma Burdett original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/02/04/introducing-the-exposure-management-webinar-series-commanding-your-attack-surface/

The digital landscape is expanding rapidly, and with it, the complexity of managing an organization’s attack surface. To help cybersecurity professionals navigate this challenge, Rapid7 presents a three-part webinar series, “Commanding Your Attack Surface.” This series dives deep into the evolving exposure management landscape, featuring insights, strategies, and practical demonstrations designed to help teams stay ahead of adversaries.

From foundational concepts to cutting-edge solutions, this series is a must-watch for anyone looking to enhance their organization’s security posture. Whether you’re just beginning to explore exposure management or you’re a seasoned practitioner, these webinars offer valuable knowledge and actionable steps to transform your approach.

Why Watch? Key Learnings from the Series

Webinar 1: Exposure Management 101 – Essential Concepts & Strategies. Discover the basics of exposure management and learn how to identify and mitigate risks across your attack surface. This session explores Gartner’s Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework and outlines how a proactive approach can reduce your organization’s likelihood of a breach by threefold.

Watch the Webinar here

Webinar 2: Take Command of Your Attack Surface with Rapid7 Exposure Command. Dive into Rapid7’s cutting-edge Exposure Command platform, which provides unified attack defense and response capabilities. Learn how to bridge the “security visibility gap” by leveraging real-time data aggregation, advanced correlation, and a vendor-agnostic approach to create a single source of truth for your security team.

Watch the Webinar here

Webinar 3: Meeting the Exposure Management Challenge – Key Use Cases for Success. Hear from industry experts on the most pressing challenges in exposure management today. Gain insights into best practices for unifying visibility, prioritizing risks, and validating controls to maximize the effectiveness of your security investments.

Watch the Webinar here

Each session builds on the last, equipping you with the tools and knowledge to proactively manage and defend your attack surface. Click through to view the webinars and transform your cybersecurity strategy today!

Surface Command and Unified Attack Surface Management

At the heart of successful exposure management lies Surface Command, Rapid7’s solution for a continuous 360° view of your attack surface. Here’s how Surface Command can transform your security operations:

• Eradicate Blind Spots: Achieve unparalleled visibility by monitoring internal and external assets, uncovering shadow IT, and eliminating coverage gaps.
• Defend with Full Context: Leverage native and third-party enrichment to identify the exposures adversaries are most likely to exploit.
• Accelerate Response: Equip teams with actionable context to triage the full blast radius of an attack and respond more effectively.

Surface Command enables teams to detect, prioritize, and remediate security issues across their entire digital estate, empowering organizations to defend proactively against emerging threats.

Ready to take control of your attack surface?
Explore the possibilities with Surface Command here

Post Syndicated from Pauline Logan original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/11/19/accelerate-mean-time-to-exposure-remediation-across-hybrid-environments-with-remediation-hub/

As organizations continue to scale their digital infrastructure, the volume of vulnerabilities and exposures grows at an overwhelming pace. Security teams often find themselves inundated with alerts and risk signals, unable to remediate every issue within their environment. They often struggle to keep pace with the dynamic nature of threats, and existing tools were not built to address the complexity of modern IT environments.

With limited time and resources, trying to address every potential vulnerability is not feasible. This reality has driven the need for prioritization—teams must focus on the vulnerabilities that present the highest risks to their organization, based on factors like attacker behaviors, real-world threat intelligence, and exploitability.

Meet Remediation Hub, Your New Home for Exposure Prioritization and Remediation

Rapid7’s Remediation Hub, our newest addition to the Exposure Command platform, is designed to address this exact challenge. Remediation Hub automatically prioritizes various risk signals across your hybrid environment and suggests the actions your team can take that would have the largest impact on reducing your overall risk posture.

The solution leverages foundational visibility from Surface Command, which presents a comprehensive view of your attack surface, combining both external scanning and cyber asset management to provide a dynamic inventory and topology map of every asset across your environment. Underpinned by a powerful graph database, the platform allows teams to visualize the entire attack surface and understand the interconnected relationships between assets, ensuring that teams are guided to take action on the risks that are not only likely to be exploited but could also have the broadest blast radius.

Remediation Hub considers factors like public accessibility, reachability, and the presence of downstream controls (like a firewall, for instance) when prioritizing vulnerabilities. The platform’s Active Risk incorporates real-world threat intelligence from Rapid7 Labs and our open source community to provide clarity into what CVEs are being actively exploited in the wild, which could provide insight into which exposures across your environment attackers are likely to target.

Along with insight into the impacted assets, teams are also provided step-by-step guidance on how to implement the suggested fix, with many actions available as native automation workflows.

Proactive Exposure Management: Moving from Reactive to Proactive

By taking a more targeted, intelligence-driven approach to remediation, security teams can move from reactive to proactive exposure management, ultimately making their organizations more resilient to attacks and accelerating the time it takes to both detect and remediate exposures that pop up across their environments.

To learn more and experience a self-guided Product Tour, click here.

What’s coming next?

In the next post, we’ll walk you through how users can leverage Remediation Hub when responding to an Emergent Threat, including gathering available information about a zero-day, building an understanding of your exposure, along with step-by-step remediation guidance.

We’ll also, of course, continue to bring additional enhancements to Remediation Hub geared toward making it easier for teams to more effectively collaborate with stakeholders across the organization to prioritize and remediate exposures across their hybrid environments. So be sure to stay tuned here for more posts with those updates. As always, we welcome customer feedback and would love to hear from you! Your input helps us tailor our product roadmap, based on your priorities and business needs.