In this data-driven era, organizations have shifted from leveraging insights from siloed data sources to aggregating data to proactively identify and mitigate risks. By collecting and analyzing telemetry data, security teams can assess the significance of potential risks and prioritize them accordingly. For years, we have had EDR, SIEM, SOAR and XDR to correlate data in order to gain higher fidelity, actionable insights when incidents occur. However, we need the same contextual insights to enhance cybersecurity hygiene and posture, enabling a proactive stance—akin to securing a house before a break-in rather than reacting afterward.
Easier said than done..
The perpetual challenge of cybersecurity is comparable to constantly being under siege. It's like battling chronic pain—threats are incessant, and the urgency to address them never wanes. Focusing on preventive measures is difficult when you're in the throes of immediate danger. Imagine trying to hit the gym or take vitamins when you're in agony; you have to address the pain first.
Instead of exhausting all our resources trying to mitigate 80% of the pain, maybe we should consider reallocating some of those resources to fortify our defenses and improve exposure and security posture overall. It's about finding a balance—a middle ground where we accept that we can't eliminate all threats and vulnerabilities but strive to achieve a level of confidence in our organization's security.
Protecting your crown jewels
How can we focus our precious resources quickly to the most significant, imminent risks with high confidence, instead of wasting hours upon hours of time analyzing the neverending streams of security findings? How can we protect our crown jewels first?
What if we could easily combine deep internal visibility of critical assets with business context and an attacker’s view from the outside?
A cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) platform, like JupiterOne, captures a vast array of data points by natively integrating with core infrastructure. This includes security controls, vulnerability scanners, code, applications, and identity providers. Additionally, cyber asset management solutions are able to codify business context with queries and tagging to automate the identification of crown jewels within an organization’s digital infrastructure. However, for an organization to shift to a proactive defense it must have both internal security measures and external threat visibility.
Know yourself and your enemy
There's an old saying, "Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be in peril." CAASM solutions provide the insights necessary to know your internal environment thoroughly. Organizations also need to understand how adversaries perceive their defenses. Proactive security is the combination of internal insight and context with external attack surface, security validation and threat research . This isn’t just about identifying open ports or vulnerabilities visible from the outside; it's about understanding the exploitability of these externally facing vulnerabilities, plus the attack path forward if or when they get in.
Visualizing comprehensive, proactive security
Our vision is to offer business and security context to critical assets, not just isolated data points like risk scores for IP addresses or speculative information from dark web monitoring. Our most recently announced Exposure Management capability provides actionable insights—determining with high confidence whether a high value asset is likely to be exploited. This solution provides prioritization that enables your organization to focus on imminent threats that require immediate attention, ensuring a proactive approach to cybersecurity. Identifying and detecting the vast number of exposures as an attacker would and reducing them to just the one or two most critical exposures.
Imagine this scenario: an attacker finds a way into your environment. What next? Is the breached entry point a minor gateway to test systems, or does it lead directly to your most valuable business critical assets? With JupiterOne’s unified insights and new Exposure Management capability, you can map out the complete attack path. Once an attacker breaches the initial defenses, you can understand exactly what can be accessed and exploited. With this context and information you can develop a focused and proactive defense strategy, securing both the external facing resources and the critical assets beyond them.
One more thing…
In today’s tech / cyber landscape, it wouldn’t be complete without talking about AI. Like others I’m optimistic and hopeful the impact AI can have on proactive cybersecurity. AI excels at pattern recognition, allowing it to identify correlations and anomalies efficiently. Secondly, with advancements in large language models, AI is adept at interpreting complex data and presenting it in a more comprehensible and common-sense manner. We plan to leverage AI to not only enhance our product with expert knowledge and complex mappings but also to identify broader patterns that are beyond manual coding capabilities.
Furthermore, AI can analyze and simplify the presentation of attack paths, offering clear conclusions and actionable recommendations. For instance, it can suggest the most effective fixes or identify which changes could significantly improve an organization's security posture. That’s it for now, but more to come on AI.
