How Unified Visibility Across all Cyber Assets Reduces Your Attack Surface

The modern network in an organization is like a digital solar system with a vast collection of applications, users, and devices. Each connection expands an organization’s attack surface, giving threat actors hundreds or thousands of potential initial access opportunities. 

While many organizations can identify the traditional IT devices that connect to their networks, they often have no way to clearly identify the operational technology (OT), Internet of Things (IoT), and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. The asset inventory tools that detect traditional devices, like laptops and workstations, often fail to capture data from other types of connected devices. Even worse, they can take the devices offline and disrupt business operations. 

To reduce the attack surface, organizations need unified visibility across all connected devices so they know what they have and how to best protect their cyber assets. 

Why Do Organizations Struggle to Gain Unified Visibility?

The modern enterprise network is a distributed ecosystem of heterogeneous devices, many of which were never designed with security in mind. Historically, organizations deployed OT devices in air-gapped networks, preventing them from accessing IT assets or the public internet. Meanwhile, IoT devices built to connect to the public internet often lack the memory and compute power necessary for managing security. 

However, both of these connected device types create new risks for organizations. Every unknown device creates a new risk, yet organizations often lack unified visibility for the following reasons:

• Device proliferation: Managing high volumes of connected devices that regularly connect to and disconnect from networks without centralized approval or visibility. 
• Shadow assets: Adding devices outside the standard procurement or deployment workflows. 
• Fragmented operating systems and protocols: Connecting devices that run proprietary firmware, outdated operating system (OS) versions, or vendor-specific protocols that traditional scanners fail to identify. 
• Interconnected risks: Communicating with servers, APIs, cloud applications, and other equipment where a compromise in one layer impacts others. 

Why Are These Visibility Issues Risky?

In complex environments, users, devices, and applications are all connected. Having a blind spot in one area can have a cascading effect across the others. 

Lack of Visibility into Vulnerabilities

OT, IoT, and IoMT manufacturers often fail to supply security updates for firmware and operating systems. Further, organizations often face challenges when trying to update operating systems, with some no longer supported by the manufacturer. Without visibility into devices, security teams have no way to identify, assess, or remediate these potential exposures. 

Lateral Movement Across Networks

One unmanaged device can become an initial attack vector. Once threat actors gain initial unauthorized access, they can move laterally across the network. Without understanding typical OT and IoT device communications, organizations have no way to identify potential connectivity with attacker infrastructures. 

Inaccurate Risk Prioritization

Organizations need to understand context to assess and mitigate risk appropriately. The lack of visibility means organizations have no way to understand device criticality, exploitability, and operational impact. Without visibility, organizations waste resources on ineffective mitigation strategies. 

Potential Compliance Violations

Compliance frameworks require accurate asset inventories and risk assessments. Without comprehensive visibility, organizations may fail to meet these requirements, leading to audit findings or fines. 

Why Do Organizations Struggle to Gain Unified Visibility?

While visibility is critical, organizations struggle because the traditional IT asset management tools fail to account for OT, IoT, and IoMT nuances. Meanwhile, organizations continue to add more of these devices to their networks. 

Active Scanners Impact Connectivity

Traditional IT asset and vulnerability management tools typically use active scanning to collect data. However, these probes can take OT, IoT, and IoMT offline. These service disruptions can impact business operations or, in some cases, human health and safety. 

Proprietary Protocols Hide Telemetry

Many OT and IoT devices communicate using specialized or vendor-specific protocols. Since traditional asset inventory tools were meant for typical IT technologies, they cannot decode traffic or extract meaningful device fingerprints. 

Device Identity Is Complex

Unlike IT assets, OT and IoT devices come with challenges around classification, especially when trying to automate processes. Understanding the devices’ identity is difficult because they lack:

• Memory for installing agents.
• Standard OS fingerprints.
• Easily accessible logs.
• Consistent naming conventions.

This makes them difficult to classify, track, or monitor over time.

Diverse Sources Generate Data

Data siloes lead to fragmented data, especially when organizations collect telemetry from multiple locations. Some device data lives in:

• Network traffic
• Vendor management consoles
• Medical equipment databases
• OT controllers
• Cloud applications

Reconciling these sources without normalization is extremely difficult.

Missing Context Creates Gaps

Identification without context means security teams have no way to understand risk. Security teams need context, such as:

• Known vulnerabilities
• Exploitability
• Clinical or operational criticality
• Location and network segment
• Behavioral baselines
• Communication flows

Without insight into how devices normally operate or their value to the organization, security teams have no way to identify abnormal behavior or prioritize critical assets. 

Best Practices for Achieving Unified Cyber Asset Visibility

Gaining a unified view of all cyber assets is the cornerstone of a robust security program. Organizations need to augment their traditional asset inventory tools with solutions designed to create a holistic view of connected devices across the IT, OT, IoT, and IoMT landscape. 

Ingest All Available Device Data

To eliminate blind spots, organizations should aggregate data from various sources, including:

• Passive network monitoring
• Device traffic analysis
• Vendor-provided data feeds
• CMMS / asset databases
• EHR or operational systems
• IoT management consoles
• OT controllers
• Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) and firmware data

Collecting more data about the devices enables organizations to create more accurate fingerprints and classifications. 

Normalize and Enrich Device Fingerprints

The tools that collect device telemetry often create inconsistencies that impact the data’s quality, as different names for the same device can lead to duplicate entries. By normalizing the data, organizations can ensure their asset inventory uses quality data and can correlate data across tools to incorporate context. 

Normalization solves these challenges by:

• Unifying device identifiers
• Standardizing fingerprints
• Mapping communication patterns
• Enriching device profiles with vulnerability and threat context
• Aligning devices to known types and models

Establish Behavioral Baselines and Surface Anomalies Early

Defining the behavior that triggers an alert requires knowing how the devices act normally. When working with diverse device ecosystems, organizations need to define baselines that include:

• Normal external and internal communications
• Expected protocols
• Expected network volumes
• Operational usage patterns

After defining these baselines, security teams can identify anomalies like unexpected outbound communications or new trust paths that can indicate a potential security incident.

Correlate Vulnerability & Exploitability Data with Device Context

With this normalized data, the organization can incorporate additional context, like threat intelligence. Prioritizing vulnerabilities based on organizational impact and attacker activity enables security and vulnerability management teams to more efficiently mitigate risk. 

To prioritize remediation activities, organizations should correlate:

• Software/firmware vulnerabilities
• Known exploited vulnerabilities
• Device criticality
• Communication behavior
• Compensating controls
• Exploitability likelihood

Automate Risk Prioritization

After establishing asset criticality, organizations can use machine learning (ML) to identify the riskiest devices. Automation accelerates:

• Identifying the highest-risk devices
• Validating compensating controls
• Recommending mitigation paths
• Modeling risk reduction outcomes

Organizations can apply this automation to compensating controls beyond applying a security patch to reduce risk, like:

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

How Asimily Enables Attack Surface Reduction with Unified Visibility

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.