Shining a light: Why asset inventory is key to exposure management

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If your organization has best-of-breed cybersecurity tools, great. Each one is probably excellent at what it does.

Your cloud access security broker (CASB) keeps a close eye on who uses your online applications, and what those users do. Your vulnerability scanner spots hidden flaws in your endpoints and on-prem apps. Your external attack surface management (EASM) tool flags open ports and unauthorized devices trying to connect out of your network.

But outside of their areas of focus, these point solutions can miss a lot. The vulnerability scanner doesn't see misconfigured access points and has no visibility into the cloud. The CASB can't monitor "shadow cloud" instances set up without IT authorization. And the EASM tool is blind to unauthorized programs and rogue devices buried in your internal networks.

"Critical insights slip through the cracks," writes Hadar Landau, a Product Marketing Manager at Tenable, in a recent blog post. "A low-severity vulnerability tied to a high-privilege identity; a misconfigured cloud asset that provides the missing link in an attack path. These are the hidden relationships attackers exploit, but your siloed tools never surface."

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If this sounds like your organization's situation, you may not have a unified sense of your environment and its potential vulnerabilities. In fact, huge parts of your systems may be unseen, unmanaged and uncontrolled. It could be that you've got a disconnected mess ripe for an attacker's picking.

To improve your security posture and, if you're in a regulated industry, your compliance scores, you'll need to perform a thorough inventory of all your assets: software, hardware, remote, on-prem, authorized, unauthorized, cloud, IoT, OT, identity, mobile.

Only in that way can you get a clear picture of your total environment, and your total exposure, and then take steps to address that exposure. As the adage goes, you need to know what you have before you can protect it.

Siloes, blind spots and hidden attack paths

An attacker doesn't care how fancy your point-solution protection tools are or how many alerts they pop up. All they want to do is burrow into your systems through the gaps that separate your security tools' areas of competence.

Unfortunately, your tools or SOC staff may not be able to see the entire potential attack path. What may seem like a minor mistake on a login page, hardly worth the effort to fix, could end up being the gateway to compromising a crucial application.

Growing, dynamic organizations have few ways to stop such problems from building up as they expand and add capabilities. New acquisitions or mergers bring foreign assets and tools that may be hard to fold into the existing IT infrastructure. Staff members impatient for software-requisition approval may spin up cloud instances or feed company data into public AI tools without IT authorization.

Departing managers may leave behind highly privileged identities that could become an attacker's toehold. Hardware upgrades will deliberately exclude obsolete endpoints with deprecated operating systems kept around only to run legacy programs.

These factors add up to create fragmented, inconsistent environments with unclear boundaries and unknown numbers of assets — just what an attacker looks for in a target. They also create compliance nightmares, guaranteed to cause pain when audit time comes around again.

Yet there's an easy way to get a firm grip on what you know you have, what you assume you don't have, and what you don't know you do have.

Exposure management brightens the darkest corners

One of the key steps in implementing an exposure-management program is to perform a thorough asset inventory, part of the vulnerability-discovery stage of the exposure-management cycle. The Tenable One platform provides automated, AI-assisted scanners and detection agents to perform that process.

"The journey begins with a foundational shift: moving from disparate lists of assets to a single, unified and deduplicated inventory," notes a recent Tenable blog post.

"This isn't just a list of IPs and hostnames," the blog post adds. "A true exposure management platform creates a rich, contextualized view by aggregating data from all of your sensing tools — including those from Tenable as well as third-party, cloud, identity and OT systems."

It's also a continuous, dynamic inventory, one that changes and shifts over time to give you a complete picture of your network and IT environment minute-by-minute. Assets are not only catalogued; connections are mapped, roles are defined, privileges are listed, ownership is attributed.

Once the inventory is complete, then your organization can move on to the next step: scanning for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and possible avenues of attack.

"The goal is to see your organization not as you've built it, but as an attacker sees it — as a web of interconnected opportunities," read the blog post. "The most powerful capability of a mature exposure management program is the ability to visualize these connections as potential attack paths."

Or, as Landau puts it, "with each piece of integrated data — from vulnerability management, endpoint security, identity management, asset management, application security, cloud security and OT security — the picture becomes clearer."

"Scattered insights evolve into a connected risk story," she adds, "allowing you to separate the real threats from the noise and prioritize remediation actions with confidence."

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