Exposure Management

Exposure Management (EM)

Exposure management is a program based upon a set of processes and capabilities that allow enterprises to evaluate the visibility, accessibility, and vulnerability of their digital assets continually and consistently.

EM is delivered using five stages: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization. An EM program leverages tools to inventory assets and vulnerabilities, simulate or test attacks, and other forms of security assessment process and technologies.

Security professionals responsible for managing risk have traditionally looked at vulnerability scanning and security controls to identify the level of exposure infrastructure is subjected to. The effort and diversity of potential issues can lead to conflicting priorities. And managing and monitoring discrete products and tools can lead to what is known as dashboard fatigue.

Exposure management is necessary to govern and prioritize risk reduction. It conducts three types of activities:

– Identify the likelihood of exploitation based upon visibility on an attack surface

– Inventory and categorize the exposure (vulnerability, threat intelligence, digital assets)

– Validate whether attacks will be successful and security controls can assist with detecting or preventing them

Ridge Security exposure management support

As part of an integrated exposure management program, Ridge Security’s RidgeBot^® enables organizations to frequently and consistently test their infrastructure, applications, and defenses to find and mitigate weaknesses, gaps and operational deficiencies faster. RidgeBot^® acts like human attackers using sophisticated exploits. RidgeBot^® relentlessly locates exploits across an enterprise network, document their findings, continuously measure results and effectiveness, and verify vulnerabilities.

RidgeBot^® enables organizations to conduct automated pentesting from an attacker’s point of view. Before exposures are put into production, RidgeBot^® finds, assesses, prioritizes, and fixes a wide set of exposures before bad actors get to them. The resulting validation allows organizations to see what would happen in the event of an attack, how their defenses would cope, and how well the processes would perform.