Today’s cyber defenders are working from a siloed set of security signals, capabilities, and visibility. This model creates gaps in defenders’ ability to effectively link alerts or vulnerabilities together and prevents them from proactively addressing security risk before attackers can exploit it. Instead of analyzing how an attacker could utilize multiple low-level vulnerabilities to gain access to an environment, defenders are stuck trying to prioritize their efforts based on narrow lists within domains or areas.
But what if you could view your attack surface from an adversary’s point of view? By consolidating posture, vulnerability, external attack surface, and cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) under an integrated exposure management solution, organizations can contextualize and prioritize risk across their entire digital estate for more proactive threat protection.
Connected environments create new pathways to compromise
There’s a critical divide between the way cyber defenders protect their digital estates and how attackers target hybrid and multicloud environments. While modern environments are connected, the tools used to protect them are not.
Attackers will often take advantage of connected environments by jumping from domain to domain, treating your environment as an interconnected graph with multiple pathways they can leverage to reach high-value assets. These pathways are also known as attack paths, and they are a widespread problem for hybrid and multicloud organizations.
Microsoft’s 2024 State of Multicloud Risk Report found that the average organization contains 351 potential attack paths that threat actors can use to reach high-value assets. Eighty-four percent of attack paths originate because of internet exposure, and 66% involve insecure credentials. Organizations must gain visibility into these paths to understand their attack surface and prioritize protecting their critical assets.
However, uncovering attack paths is incredibly challenging when defenders are limited to their individual domain expertise and the limited insights from siloed tools. Not only is it time-consuming to manually correlate these disparate signals, but it’s also difficult for defenders to understand which risks they should remediate first—especially since new attack paths can emerge at any time in dynamic environments.
By contrast, an integrated exposure management solution allows cyber defenders to go on the offensive by offering holistic visibility into where they are most vulnerable. If teams know where an attack could originate, they can proactively shut down the pathway before adversaries have the chance to use it.
Unlock proactive security with prioritization
Beyond offering a graph-like view into all the ways an attacker could breach their environment, integrated exposure management can also help security teams prioritize their efforts by identifying critical assets and measuring the effectiveness of their security program.
Before teams can embrace a proactive security model, they first need to understand what they’re protecting and where those critical assets live. An integrated exposure management solution spans multiple domains across the cloud and on premises—including applications, identity, networks, data, endpoints, and more—to provide a graph that shows the interconnected relationships (pathways) between assets and automatically tags critical assets so that security teams can focus their efforts accordingly. This allows for defenders to better detect risk to cloud resources due to vulnerable assets on premises and vice versa. It can also continuously monitor and update assets with any changes to their criticality status.
Additionally, organizations can use integrated exposure management to measure and monitor the effectiveness of their security programs. Rather than having a list of individual alerts that security practitioners must react to, exposure management provides a scoring metric to measure effectiveness across multiple security domains like identity, cloud, and endpoint, as well as cross-domain threats like ransomware protection or business email compromise. Teams can then weigh security recommendations against these scores to better understand which actions will have the greatest impact on their overall risk posture.
Ultimately, as modern hybrid and multicloud environments continue to scale and threat actors get better at launching rapid, sophisticated attacks, cyber defenders need to be able to limit their risk by identifying and shutting down attack paths before adversaries can compromise them. Integrated exposure management provides the visibility, context, and prioritization security teams need to make the switch from reactive to proactive defense.
To learn more about how you can break down security silos and enable proactive risk management, check out the
general availability announcement for our new Microsoft Security Exposure Management product.
Written by Brjann Brekkan.
