Explore internet-facing asset discovery to protect your business by identifying and securing exposed online assets. Ransomware, state-directed cybercriminals and the dark web gangs — in today’s world, it’s crucial for companies to safeguard their assets from cyber threats. Ensuring the security of these resources is vital, but it becomes challenging with the increasing adoption of cloud services and the difficulty of monitoring the entire asset perimeter. Consequently, organizations can make mistakes that expose their assets online, allowing malicious actors to exploit them and ultimately expanding the attack surface.
To address these issues, you can use Autobahn Security’s internet-facing asset discovery. This process can help you to make informed decisions about your cybersecurity strategy and reduce the attack surface.
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of discovering internet-facing assets for cybersecurity and how it works. We’ll also talk about the problems organizations face in managing their asset inventory, the general process of asset discovery, and how using internet-facing asset discovery can help solve these problems.
By the end of this post, you’ll (hopefully) have a better understanding of internet-facing asset discovery’s significance — and how it can help you make smarter decisions about your cybersecurity strategy to safeguard your assets from security threats.
What problems does internet-facing asset discovery solve?
Managing IT assets can be tough for businesses since it often means dealing with a large and constantly changing number of resources. This can lead to issues with tracking assets, accuracy of asset data, and a lack of visibility into the asset inventory.
A major challenge in IT asset management is the lack of visibility, which makes it hard for organizations to keep tabs on all their assets. This can lead to security issues, as some assets may remain unaccounted for and be vulnerable to unknown security threats.
Internet-facing asset discovery addresses this pain point by offering a complete view of a company’s online asset boundaries. This helps ensure comprehensive asset inventory by identifying any overlooked assets, ensuring nothing is left unaccounted for.
Asset tracking is another consistent pain in IT asset management, which can lead to a lack of accurate data and make it difficult to track the location of assets. This problem often arises from using manual tracking methods that are error-prone and typically time-consuming.
Internet-facing asset discovery can help you address this challenge by giving you a centralized view of all assets exposed to the internet. This empowers organizations to effectively track the locations of their assets and ensure their appropriate usage.
How does internet-facing asset discovery work?
Carrying out internet-facing asset discovery involves several steps, beginning with entering seed information, usually a domain name. Moreover, the seed information matches with data from the internet, including whois and certificate transparency records, to discover related assets. Additionally, to broaden the coverage, subdomain exploration utilizes brute-forcing and search methods, revealing additional domains and subdomains associated with the organization.
However, the challenge lies in pinpointing and isolating assets, leaving only those that belong to the organization, due to the signal to noise ratio. Several outdated and similar assets not belonging to the organization may be encountered. Therefore, businesses need a good ratio of coverage versus accuracy to identify only the organization’s assets.
In brief, internet-facing asset discovery is a multi-step process that starts with seed information, matches it with information from the internet, and applies subdomain expansion with brute-forcing and search techniques. While the signal to noise ratio poses a challenge, our service provides confidence scores to address this and helps businesses identify critical assets that need protection.
What are the benefits of Autobahn Security for internet-facing asset discovery?
Autobahn Security’s internet-facing asset discovery offers several key features that make it an effective solution for businesses. Our service is easy to set up; with just one domain (seed-information) you can begin the discovery process. Additionally, we support multiple domains to further enhance our asset discovery results.
Our asset discovery is industry leading in both coverage and accuracy. To minimize housekeeping efforts, we offer confidence scores that represent the difficulty of identifying the asset. A higher confidence score means an asset is more likely to belong to your organization, and the opposite is true for lower scores.
Our internet-facing asset discovery service delivers several unique advantages, such as easy setup, confidence scores that indicate asset identification complexity, market-leading asset discovery results in terms of coverage and accuracy, and time savings in cleaning false positives.
So how do I get started with internet-facing asset discovery?
Internet-facing asset is crucial for businesses to identify all assets belonging to the organization that are exposed online. This process helps organizations minimize their attack surface and make well-informed decisions about their cybersecurity strategy.
While this process can be painful using manual methods, companies can tackle the challenges of asset discovery with internet-facing asset discovery. By taking this approach, organizations can ensure they expose only the necessary and correctly configured assets online, thereby reducing the risk of a security breach.
Autobahn Security’s internet-facing asset discovery service provides several unique benefits, such as confidence scores that indicate asset identification complexity, industry-leading asset discovery results in terms of coverage and accuracy, and time savings by reducing false positives.
Businesses can (and should) leverage internet-facing asset discovery to make informed decisions about their cybersecurity strategy and safeguard their assets from potential security threats. Don’t wait — get started with Autobahn Security today and take control of your online asset protection.
You can book a free 14-day day trial here.
Article contributor: Lukas Rossi from the Autobahn Security Product team.