The Evolution from CAASM to Cyber Asset Exposure Management

As organizations adopt more connected devices, the traditional network perimeter no longer exists. Integrating Information Technology (IT), Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and operational technology (OT) enables companies to modernize their business processes and leverage analytics. Simultaneously, these devices expand the attack surface, making vulnerability prioritization and patch management more important than ever. 

Realistically, applying security patches to every vulnerability is impossible. Recognizing this, organizations are transitioning from reactive cyber attack asset surface management (CAASM) strategies and tools to a more proactive cyber exposure management approach. This fundamental shift differentiates itself from traditional strategies by holistically managing cyber risk rather than solely focusing on vulnerability management. 

As organizations work to improve their security posture, they should understand how to implement cyber exposure management strategies across their IT, IoT, OT, and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. 

What Is Exposure Management in Cybersecurity?

Cyber exposure management is a continuous, strategic program designed to identify, assess, prioritize, and mitigate various potential security weaknesses across the entire digital and physical attack surface. By moving beyond the narrow focus of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs), exposure management incorporates any condition that threat actors could potentially use to compromise an asset or achieve a malicious objective. 

Cyber exposure management looks at the environment through an adversary’s eyes to:

• Identify all network-connected assets.
• Identify all assets that are visible to attackers. 
• Identify security weaknesses in the assets, including misconfigurations, identity and access issues, and outdated operating systems, software, and firmware. 
• Review systems and networks to identify ways that attackers could chain vulnerabilities together to create an attack path. 
• Assess potential business impact related to successful attack path exploitations. 

With an attacker-centric mentality, organizations gain a realistic view of their cyber risk posture. 

What Is the Difference Between Exposure Management and Vulnerability Management?

Cyber Exposure Management expands on traditional Vulnerability Management by shifting focus from individual software flaws to the entire landscape of potential attack paths and their business impact. While related, cyber exposure management and traditional vulnerability management differ across the following:

• Scope: While vulnerability management focuses on traditional IT assets, cyber exposure management encompasses the entire extended attack surface, including IoT and OT. 
• Focus: While vulnerability management narrowly targets catalogued vulnerabilities, like CVEs, cyber exposure management addresses a broad spectrum of exposures beyond CVEs, including shadow IT and security control gaps. 
• Prioritization: While vulnerability management relies heavily on technical severity metrics like the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), cyber exposure management uses a risk-based model that integrates context like business criticality, threat intelligence, and attack path analysis. 
• Goal: While vulnerability management seeks to systematically reduce the number of CVEs, which can become overwhelming for IT and patch management teams, cyber exposure management seeks to proactively reduce measurable business risk by disrupting likely attack paths and hardening business-critical assets.

What Are the Key Benefits of Cyber Exposure Management?

Adopting a comprehensive exposure management program delivers tangible benefits that strengthen an organization’s security posture and align cybersecurity efforts with business objectives, including:

• Proactive risk reduction: Shifting from a reactive to a proactive security stance by continuously discovering and mapping potential attack paths rather than waiting for researchers or vendors to publish vulnerabilities. 
• Reduced IT workload: Reducing IT and security team alert fatigue by prioritizing exposures based on business risk for fewer remediation tasks than vulnerability scanner reports. 
• Improved executive reporting: Translating cyber risk from technical language to business risk by looking at potential financial loss, operational disruption, or reputation damage. 
• Improved compliance posture: Aligning compliance frameworks and risk management with proactive exposure management activities that document due diligence and a proactive approach to cyber risk reduction. 

Why Are Organizations Moving Away from Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM)?

CAASM tools are the foundation of the organization’s asset inventory, cataloging the devices and assets across various environments. However, even the most comprehensive inventory list cannot automatically translate to comprehensive risk insights. 

A full cyber exposure management solution enables organizations to:

• Enrich asset data with vulnerability information, business context, and threat intelligence.
• Analyze the relationships between assets to map potential attack paths.
• Validate exposures to confirm their exploitability.
• Prioritize remediation based on business impact.
• Integrate with workflows to ensure mitigation occurs.

Best Practices for Implementing Cyber Exposure Management Across IT, IoT, OT, and IoMT

Implementing an effective exposure management program requires a structured, cyclical approach that can adapt to a dynamic and diverse technology landscape. By implementing these best practices, organizations can more effectively and efficiently manage cyber risks. 

Identify Exposed Assets

Before organizations can mitigate risk, they need insight into the different IT, IoT, OT, and IoMT assets connected to their networks. However, many organizations struggle to identify their IoT, OT, and IoMT devices because traditional vulnerability scanners can take them offline. 

To create a comprehensive asset inventory, organizations should:

• Augment active scanner data with passive, agentless discovery across all asset classes. 
• Normalize and de-duplicate inventory records to prevent a single “device” from being listed multiple times based on different tool definitions.
• Enrich each asset record with metadata, including device type, firmware version, serial number, manufacturer, network connectivity, data flows, business owner, location, and role.
• Integrate feeds from configuration management databases (CMDB), Computerized Maintenance Management System( CMMS), Network Access Control (NAC), security information and event management (SIEM), and endpoint tools for comprehensive coverage.

Map the Attack Surface

With a full inventory, organizations can identify the different ways that attackers can move through devices and systems. This capability moves from identifying an attack surface to understanding attack paths that can lead to data breaches. 

When determining how assets connect to each other and their potential exposures, an organization should:

• Classify assets by exposure, like which ones are public-facing, behind firewalls, segmented OT, or on isolated medical networks.
• Identify external and internet‐reachable interfaces, remote access paths, partner/vendor access, and cloud dependencies.
• Map dependencies between devices and networks, like which sensors feed which systems, which OT systems control physical assets, and which medical devices link to corporate networks.
• Produce visualizations so security and GRC leadership can quickly grasp the “attack surface footprint,” like using asset-map or attack-path charts. 
• Incorporate behavioral and traffic data to enhance mapping beyond simple inventory, like monitoring east-west flows or anomalous connections. 

Assess Risk

For each asset and its associated exposures, organizations need to determine how likely malicious actors are to attack them and the severity of the attack’s impact. By ranking exposures in terms of actual risk, IT and security teams can focus on more than just raw vulnerabilities. 

When assessing risk, organizations should:

• Map device vulnerabilities across operating system, software, and firmware versions, misconfigurations, and known CVEs.
• Combine vulnerability data with exploitability information from threat intelligence with device context like criticality, connectivity, and business function.
• Use risk scoring frameworks to prioritize exposures.
• Consider compensating controls when assessing actual risk, like segmentation, network micro-segmentation, and zero-trust policies.
• Model various attack scenarios to capture the impact on OT, IoMT, and physical safety.

Prioritize Exposures

Once organizations have a holistic risk assessment that includes all network-connected devices, they can prioritize their exposure management activities. A good prioritization approach blends risk, business impact, and remediation cost. 

When prioritizing exposures and responses, organizations should:

• Rank exposures by risk score augmented with business value and operational urgency insights.
• Incorporate remediation cost and effort, as well as potential operational impact, like downtime risk, into priority decisions.
• Highlight assets and devices that sit in high-value zones, like OT that controls physical processes or IoMT devices tied to patient safety.
• Implement decision-ready dashboards, like the top 10 high-risk devices, high-impact easy-to-fix items, or vendor remote access pathways.
• Engage business stakeholders to validate real-world impact, like collaborating with OT operations, clinical engineering, and facility management.
• Trigger automation or workflow alerts for the top-tier exposures.

Mitigate Exposure

While prioritization is important, it only acts as a step toward mitigating the exposure and its risk. Sometimes applying a security update is a mitigation measure, but often vendors fail to provide security patches for firmware. 

To mitigate exposure, organizations should:

• Install firmware and software patches when available and apply compensating controls for other devices, like using segmentation, firewall rules, NAC or enforcement.
• Enforce secure configuration baselines, like disabling unused services, updating credentials, and applying the principle of least privilege.
• Apply targeted segmentation and micro-segmentation to isolate high-risk assets.
• Decommission or retire redundant, unmanaged, and unnecessary devices.
• Deploy monitoring and alerting for compensating controls effectiveness, like verifying that segmentation works or ensuring devices do not send outbound communications.
• Maintain remediation workflow tracking, like tickets, status, and metrics.

Continuously Monitor

Cyber exposure management is a continuous process that requires maintaining visibility, detecting new assets and exposures, identifying anomalous behavior, tracking remediation progress, and measuring risk reduction. 

As part of ongoing cyber exposure management, organizations should continuously monitor:

• Newly connected assets, including cloud workloads, IoT and OT connections, and shadow devices.
• Ongoing vulnerability assessment and threat-update data, including new CVEs and exploit campaigns.
• User behavior and network traffic to detect adversary movement, anomalies, and unauthorized access.
• Metrics and dashboards for changes to exposure surface size, number of high-risk devices, remediation backlog, mean time to remediation, and risk-reduction over time.
• Segmentation and security controls’ effectiveness through penetration testing or red-teaming.

How Asimily Enables Next-Generation Cyber Asset Exposure Management

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.