Glossary

Cyberasset attack surface management

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Key Cybersecurity Terms

Our glossary of software threat exposure management terms offers concise definitions of the evolving language of cybersecurity.

Cyberasset attack surface management (CAASM)

Cyberasset attack surface management (CAASM) enables security teams to overcome challenges associated with asset visibility and exposure. Enterprises can see all assets (internal and external). Replacing time-consuming manual processes to collect and reconcile asset information, CAASM integrates with existing tools via APIs to enable security personnel to query consolidated data, identify the range of vulnerabilities, pinpoint gaps in security controls, and remediate issues. Aggregated assets can include endpoints, servers, networked devices, and applications. 

CAASM enables security teams to improve basic security hygiene by ensuring security controls, security posture, and asset exposure are understood and remediated. This helps reduce dependencies on in-house developed systems and manual collection processes, and helps remediate gaps either manually or via automated workflows. Organizations can visualize security tool coverage, support attack surface management (ASM) processes, and correct systems of record that may have stale or missing data. 

CAASM provides complete visibility into all IT, IoT, and OT assets under an organization’s control, improving understanding of the attack surface area and existing security control gaps. It can also serve as part of a wider ASM process. 

Benefits include:

1) Speeding compliance audits and reporting through more accurate, current, and comprehensive asset and security control reports.

2) Consolidating existing products that collect asset and exposure information into a single view to reduce the need for manual processes or dependencies on in-house developed applications

3) Consolidating asset views for multiple individuals and teams, like enterprise architects, security operations and IT admins.

4) Lowering resistance to data collection from, and better security visibility into, shadow IT and third-party systems over which IT lacks governance and control. 

Ridge Security CAASM support: As part of an integrated CAASM solution, it enables organizations to frequently and consistently test their infrastructure, applications, and defenses, finding and mitigating weaknesses, gaps, and operational deficiencies faster. It acts like a human attacker, using sophisticated exploits to relentlessly locate exploits across an enterprise network, document its findings, and continuously measure results and effectiveness.