Building Cyber Resilience Through Proactive Exposure Management

For most organizations, cybersecurity is a reactive process, with attackers often knowing how to exploit a vulnerability before companies can run scans. According to one report, 32% of known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV) had exploitation evidence on or before the date of publication. Further, the typical enterprise patch cycle can take weeks, especially in complex environments consisting of IT, operational technology (OT), and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. 

Reactive processes may have protected small, contained environments with flat networks and homogeneity across devices. However, these practices place organizations and their sensitive data at risk with modern, dynamic environments. Today, organizations have connected environments with hundreds or thousands of different devices, each of which comes with different threats and risks. By remaining reactive, security teams stay in a constant state of stress. 

By embracing proactive threat exposure management, organizations can build risk-based, sustainable security programs that promote cyber resilience. 

What Are the Problems with Reactive Cybersecurity?

Reactive security frameworks are remnants of on-premises IT environments when organizations could control their networks and easily classify their devices. This approach relies on several assumptions, including that organizations:

• Know all their devices and assets. 
• Can patch all their devices. 
• Have enough people to triage alerts and tickets. 

As organizations embraced the cloud, these assumptions no longer held true. 

In parallel, digital transformation changed how threat actors could deploy attacks. Where attackers would once need physical access to devices or a physical way to disseminate malware, today they need a computer and a network connection. 

With attackers able to automate device discovery and vulnerability exploitation, organizations need proactive programs that include securing:

• IoT devices whose firmware often has no available patch. 
• OT systems that only support updates during scheduled shutdowns. 

What Are the Advantages of Proactive Exposure Management?

Where reactive security relies on scanning for known vulnerabilities, proactive exposure management helps mitigate risk arising from unknown vulnerabilities and threats, like zero-day attacks. Instead of responding only to existing vulnerabilities, proactive exposure management focuses on identifying meaningful risk linked to exploitability, asset criticality, and business impact. 

By reframing security through this lens, organizations can create proactive risk management programs that include:

• Holistic visibility: A single view of all IT, cloud, IoT, OT, and IoMT environments.
• Contextual risk: Exposure modeling that shows how attackers can move through the environment.
• Improved prioritization: Focusing on the common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) that pose the greatest risk rather than trying to patch all vulnerabilities. 
• Alignment with business objectives: Risk evaluations that map to business operations, like patient safety, data sensitivity, and service level agreements (SLAs) around availability and uptime. 
• Resilience for unpatchable devices: Risk mitigation through compensating controls, segmentation, and behavior monitoring. 

Exposure management transforms vulnerability management from a static, reactive process into a dynamic, proactive program. 

Why Do Organizations Struggle to Shift to Exposure Management?

Despite the exposure management’s benefits, many organizations face technical, cultural, and process challenges as they seek to shift to a proactive program. 

Legacy Tooling and Processes

Many organizations rely on vulnerability scanners, ticketing workflows, and patch cycles that fail to meet the needs of a hybrid environment. Despite the value that vulnerability scanners provide for managing traditional IT devices, they lack capabilities for:

• Providing safe visibility into OT, IoT, and IoMT, as their active probing can take devices offline.
• Identifying unmanaged or vendor-controlled devices. 
• Automating triage and prioritization processes. 
• Offering remediation actions beyond patching. 

Since legacy scanners have no way to identify or fingerprint many connected devices, organizations with security teams have no visibility into potential exposures from them. 

Siloed Data and Operational Inertia

When organizations do have the data, they often have no single location for managing it and assigning ownership. Some examples of this fragmentation include:

• IT maintains an asset inventory.
• Security monitoring its tools, like endpoint detection and response (EDR). 
• OT managing devices on air-gapped networks. 
• Business units tracking operational workflows.

With each department creating its own priorities and risk definitions, the organization has no clear way to share data, ownership, and context across these historically independent teams. 

Resource Constraints and Skills Gaps

Exposure management requires ongoing risk analysis, modeling, and translation across various internal functions. However, many organizations already struggle with a skills gap, especially when looking for people who have experience with OT, IoT, and IoMT.

Often, organizations may have individuals with strong skills in one area or another, but rarely people across all functions at the same level. Even more challenging, the organization needs people who can translate technical risk for each technology into business terms. 

Best Practices for Proactively Managing Cyber Exposure

As organizations invest in new business-enabling technologies, they need to manage the new risks. By focusing on cyber resilience, organizations mitigate risk while reducing operational and business disruptions. When modernizing their security program, organizations should consider the following best practices. 

Build and Maintain a Unified Asset and Exposure Inventory

Proactive exposure management starts by identifying all connected devices and assets, including:

• IT systems, like workstations. 
• IoT devices, like sensors or printers.
• OT equipment, like programmable logic controllers (PLCs) or building management system (BMS) controllers.
• Unmanaged endpoints.
• Shadow or rogue devices.

Beyond traditional active scanners, organizations need passive scanning tools that can provide:

• Device fingerprints and profiles.
• Behavioral context. 
• Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) data. 

By supplementing current vulnerability management tools with a passive scanner that collects data about all devices, organizations can parse and normalize the different naming conventions to create a single source of truth for device data. 

Assess Risk to Prioritize Activities Appropriately

After identifying and aggregating all device information, organizations can move from vulnerability identification to exposure modeling that evaluates:

• Vulnerabilities in operating systems, software, and firmware. 
• Misconfigurations, like failing to disable unnecessary services. 
• Attack paths showing how threat actors can move across technologies and networks. 
• Exploit likelihood using threat intelligence to identify the vulnerabilities that attackers are targeting. 
• Compensating controls, like disabling unused ports that attackers can use. 
• Business criticality – determined by identifying the devices and services that are most important to daily operation. 

This exposure model becomes the foundation for a risk-based prioritization framework, enabling teams to prioritize patching and remediation for:

• High-impact devices.
• Assets with active exploitation.
• Exposures that enable lateral movement.
• Unpatchable devices requiring compensating controls.
• Devices tied to critical operations or patient safety.

Integrate Workflows and Collaboration to Operationalize Remediation

Exposure management involves security, IT, OT, clinical engineering, facilities, procurement, and executive leadership teams. Organizations need to coordinate across these teams to remediate activities. 

As the organization’s exposure management program matures, it includes the following:

• Automated ticketing and notifications
• Integrated exposure data with device owners
• Risk outlines in operational terms and technical terms, like CVSS scores
• Cross-team visibility
• Connected insights across device discovery, risk assessment, vulnerability remediation, and control validation. 

Further, since patching may not always be an option, teams need to collaborate around determining the appropriate compensating control, which can include:

• Network segmentation.
• Isolation policies.
• Behavioral monitoring.
• Firewall rule adjustments.
• Zero-trust communication policies.

Continuously Monitor Networks and Validate Controls

In dynamic environments, risk continuously changes. Organizations that proactively manage exposure continuously monitor for:

• New devices joining the network.
• Changes in device behavior.
• Unauthorized communication patterns.
• Configuration drift.
• Newly published vulnerabilities.
• Shifts in exploit activity.

By proactively monitoring for these risky activities, organizations can take action to mitigate a potential security incident’s impact on systems and data. 

Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Track Success

To achieve desired compliance outcomes, organizations need to prove that their controls act as intended. Setting KPIs and tracking trends can help document that the exposure management program responds to identified risk. 

Some examples of KPIs include:

• Reduction in high-risk exposures.
• Decrease in unknown devices.
• Time-to-remediate critical exposures.
• Effectiveness of compensating controls.
• Overall exposure trendlines.

How Asimily Enables Proactive Exposure Management for Cyber Resilience

The Asimily platform is purposefully designed to enable exposure management strategies. Asimily passively scans network architecture for IoT devices and surfaces key details such as MAC address, model, firmware version, and any possible vulnerabilities. Asimily can also use non-passive means, such as correlating with other IoT databases, to build an asset inventory. 

Asimily can also identify high-risk vulnerabilities with our proprietary, patented algorithm that cross-references vast amounts of data from sources like EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System), Software Bills of Material (SBOMs), Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE) lists, and NIST Guidelines. By aggregating this data, organizations can more purposefully identify and assess exposure risk. Meanwhile, security teams can also use Asimily’s Risk Simulator to test fixing hardware or software vulnerabilities before they apply the resolution. Simulating a fix can help determine criticality and whether attackers will even try to breach the system, which is critical information when deciding how to better defend systems.