OSINT & Attack Surface
What does your company look like to a hacker? You might be surprised at what you find. Few companies understand the complete attack surface they offer to the Internet.
An Unseen Risk
As companies become more reliant on digital technology and their operations grow more complex, their attack surface becomes larger and more difficult to ascertain and secure. This trend has been complicated by the increasing prevalence of multi-cloud computing, perimeter-less networks, mobile devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
The escalating risk of a company's attack surface is due to several factors. One often overlooked reason is success. As companies grow they need to expand their operations and adopt new technologies to compete and fulfill their business mission. As a result each year their networks and systems become more complex.
This complexity makes it harder to properly inventory assets, identify vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors. It’s very easy for companies to lose control over the understanding of their network and technology which ends up degrading their security posture.
Third Party Risk
Another reason is the use of third-party services and applications, such as cloud providers or software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, which can introduce new attack vectors and increase the overall attack surface.
Finally, the use of mobile and IoT devices has expanded the range of entry points that attackers can exploit. When employees travel to another state or country they extend the company’s network far beyond the normally understood perimeter. For example, an employee checking email or logging in from China has brought the company network along with them.
OSINT Attack Surface
Another often overlooked factor is OSINT. Open Source Information (OSINT) refers to any information that is publicly available and accessible to anyone. Malicious actors collect and analyze data from a variety of sources to identify patterns, relationships, and potential threats. This process often involves the use of specialized tools and techniques to gather and process large amounts of data. Some of the commonly used tools for OSINT include search engines, data scrapers, and social media monitoring tools.
OSINT includes data that is published on the internet, in public records, social media, news articles, and other sources. Some of the most dangerous forms of OSINT are found in the underground of the Dark Web where critical information such as breached data, stolen profiles and credentials are traded daily.
Building an Attack Profile of Your Company
Malicious organizations and individuals use OSINT to gain insights, gather intelligence, and built an attack map of a company. This could be in the form of an organizational chart scraped from business social networks, a phishing campaign pulled from a data breach or a technology-in-use roadmap extracted from online resumes.
New code, new employees, new apps, new cloud products, new remote networks, new devices - all of these things contribute to the ever multiplying technology footprint of a growing company.
Addressing the OSINT Risk
A yearly comprehensive cybersecurity assessment from Cybermode will identify, map and categorize the evolving attack surface of your company. Armed with this knowledge you will be able to face the threats in today’s elevated risk environment.
