What Is Exposure Assessment?

Introduction

As emphasized by Gartner®'s 2024 Strategic Roadmap for Managing Threat Exposure, addressing today's "unmanageably large issue" will soon escalate to an "impossible task" without proper validation. This showcases the fundamental flaw inherent in the traditional VM program, which fails to accurately identify and validate an organization's cyber threat exposures. Since they focus only on known vulnerabilities within software, systems, and applications, VM programs fail to identify most real-world risks that pose significant threats to any organization's security.

To address this gap, many organizations are rethinking the efficiency of their VM programs and moving to the Exposure Management approach that provides them with a broader, validated, more proactive understanding of security risks.

Figure 1. Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs) as Part of Exposure Management Programs

In this context, exposure assessment and validation work in a cohort manner to form the backbone of effective exposure management programs. As highlighted by Gartner® in their Hype Cycle for Security Operations 2024, Exposure Assessment plays a critical role in this new approach. It stands on powerhouses known as Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs) to provide a unified, consolidated view of an organization's cyber risks by gathering insights from various sources. 

Considering the importance of the process, it is crucial to understand the role played by exposure assessment within an exposure management program and the critical tools and technologies supporting this job, along with how adversarial exposure validation maximizes effectiveness.

However, before diving deeper, it's important to first define what we mean by "organizational exposures."

What Is Threat Exposure?

Exposure refers to any vulnerability, misconfiguration, or security gap that a malicious actor could use to compromise an organization's digital infrastructure. These include but are not limited to, misconfigurations, open ports, outdated certificates, unpatched systems, highly privileged accounts such as domain admins, and improperly configured compensating controls.

Figure 2. Example for Threat Exposures in an Organization 

In a way, threat exposures can be considered as those 'cracks' in your armor, the openings leading to the door you don't want: lost in reputation and revenue, which accompany breaches, data theft, and many other afflictions. Therefore, it is not just a luxury but a must that cyber threat exposures get timely identifications with efficient and effective mobilization efforts to keep a good security posture and limit the probability of highly impactful breaches. 

This is where Exposure Management enters the game, providing organizations with a systematic approach to these critical vulnerabilities before malicious actors can exploit them. In the upcoming sections, we will discuss the Exposure Management approach in greater depth.

Exposure Management

An Exposure Management program involves proactively identifying, prioritizing, validating, and remediating an organization’s threat exposures. As outlined in the figure below, it consists of several key steps.

Figure 3. Role of Exposure Assessment in Exposure Management Lifecycle

The first step, scoping, involves identifying the specific areas or risks the organization aims to assess and test. This process relies on fundamental tools and technologies, including:

• Attack Surface Management (ASM), 

• External Attack Surface Management (EASM), and 

• Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM).

Additionally, organizations can enhance and refine their scoping process by using complementary technologies like 

• SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) tools and 

• Digital Risk Protection Tools & Services (DRPT/S).

Once the scope is defined, the process moves into the second phase of the Exposure Management lifecycle: discovery of potential exposures. This is where Exposure Assessment becomes crucial.

The main objective of this blog is to provide a clear understanding of what Exposure Assessment comprises. For further insight and to see how it fits into a bigger picture, we advise reading our blog on the Exposure Management process as a whole.

What Is Exposure Assessment?

Exposure Assessment is a proactive and continuous cybersecurity process that helps organizations identify, quantify, and prioritize security exposures coming from an organization's external and internal attack surfaces—such as vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other security gaps—across their entire digital landscape.

As we will discuss more in the future, to effectively and efficiently manage organizational exposures, Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs) play a crucial role, acting as the power-houses of a comprehensive exposure management program. These platforms are increasingly adopted by organizations seeking a unified view of their security posture as EAPs consolidate data from a wide array of sources and technologies into a single system, providing a transparent and integrated perspective on an organization's risk landscape. 

In the next section, we will discuss EAPs, their benefits and shortcomings, and how Exposure Validation significantly enhances the effectiveness of Exposure Assessment practices.

What Are Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs)?

Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs) are the next generation of advanced appliances that automate identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing organizational exposures within various asset classes, including internal and external. EAPs go far beyond basic vulnerability scanning because they can provide continuous asset monitoring and full visibility into an organization's digital attack surface. 

In this section, we will discuss the technologies that Gartner has subsumed into EAPs, how these technologies perform the discovery step of exposure management while lacking certain characteristics related to prioritization, and how adversarial exposure validation tools are integrated into the process as a follow-up to get the most out of an exposure management program.

According to Gartner®’s Hype Cycle for Security Operations 2024 report,

• Vulnerability Assessment and 

• Vulnerability Prioritization Technologies 

have been subsumed into Exposure Assessment Platforms.

Figure 4. Vulnerability Assessment and Vulnerability Prioritization Technologies Consolidated Under Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs)

This highlights the significance of EAPs in modern security operations. A key strength of EAPs lies in their ability to support Exposure Management programs by consolidating diverse risk data—including vulnerability assessment results, asset ownership details, and business-critical insights—into a unified, actionable view. 

While we briefly have the capabilities of EAPs, it is also essential to address their shortcomings and limitations. In the following section, we will explore these platforms and specific aspects to provide a balanced view of the effectiveness and potential challenges of using EAPs.

Shortcomings of Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs)

Exposure Assessment Platforms are particularly important as organizations are often inundated with vulnerability findings that are prioritized solely by Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores, which may not accurately reflect the true risk to the business. Hence, EAPs address this challenge by enabling prioritization and remediation efforts based on exposure severity, asset criticality, and business impact. By contextualizing these findings with threat intelligence, EAPs increase the actionability of vulnerability data.

The EAPs together with Adversarial Exposure Validation solutions enable the security teams to zero in on only the exposures that truly matter to the organization, so they can effectively and efficiently reach the final step or stage in the CTEM lifecycle: mobilization. We will be talking more about those in the best practices section for Exposure Assessment.

To highlight the benefits of exposure validation, we will now discuss how exposure assessment, by its nature, may result in an unmanageably large set of vulnerabilities to address without the support of exposure validation.

The Paradox of Exposure Assessment

Since Exposure Assessment identifies every possible threat exposure across an organization’s attack surface, it includes a much broader range of security vulnerabilities compared to traditional vulnerability assessments. Therefore, exposure assessment flags issues that traditional vulnerability assessment tools will inherently miss, such as poorly configured compensating controls, overly permissive accounts, risk introduced by third-party vendors, etc., because it takes a holistic look at the entire digital infrastructure.

However, the greater coverage in this respect means that while a traditional vulnerability assessment process may find 1,000 discrete vulnerabilities, whereas a process of Exposure Assessment may reveal 10,000 or more.

The problem is that this holistic perspective simultaneously carries a huge challenge with it: such an extended set of exposures will be infeasible to handle unless there is a sound prioritization plan in place. In fact, this concern was also highlighted by Gartner®.

This highlights the need to integrate exposure assessment into a broader security strategy—one that emphasizes validated prioritization and streamlined mobilization. This approach enables organizations to address only the most critical threats, rather than being swamped by the numbers of exposures that are not exploitable. Coupled with Adversarial Exposure Validation technologies, organizations get the most out of their Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs) that ensure resources are optimally used for remediation. This, in turn, leads to a more valid security posture, as major risks have been addressed first, allowing optimization of time and effort in mobilization.

Now that we've emphasized the role of validation in making exposure assessment both effective and efficient, let's move on to introduce the three key checkpoints that will help you maximize the benefits of your exposure assessment process.

Three Checkpoints for Exposure Assessment

Here are three essential checkpoints to ensure your exposure assessment is driving meaningful progress toward your overall security objectives.

Checkpoint 1: Integrate Exposure Assessment into Your Security Processes

Exposure assessment isn't just another task on your cybersecurity checklist; it's a key component that should be implemented into your existing security processes. Doing so ensures that all assets of your digital environment, including internal and external, are monitored—not just the obvious ones. As we stressed before, this holistic approach enables you to uncover security exposures that traditional vulnerability assessments, by their limited nature to CVEs, will overlook.

Checkpoint 2: Make Exposure Assessment Part of the Security Journey, Not a Destination

The most common fallacy about Exposure Assessment is that people tend to think it is an endpoint, while actually Exposure Assessment is a crucial juncture and part of the overall path of security, ultimately bridging the gap from identifying risks to taking concrete action.

Think of exposure assessment as a form of diagnosis that informs higher-order security actions. For example, perhaps after finding 10,000 vulnerabilities, not all those would be as critical to your business, or even exploitable. Much like chess, not all the pieces have the same strategic value; some are irreplaceable and core to the game, while others can be expanded. Not all vulnerabilities are immediately exploitable or pose the greatest risk to your organization. That is where Exposure Validation fits in-it brings clarity on what is critical and exploitable, thus prioritizing remediation focus.

In reality, the work actually begins after the Exposure Assessment; it is for this reason that it should be seen as an enabling action and not the end of a process. It is paramount that, as an organization, your team and stakeholders alike understand where exposure assessment fits within your continuing security strategy. It turns what was otherwise a very mundane activity into something truly meaningful and proactive for your general security goals, enabling your organization to be resilient against cyber threats.

Checkpoint 3: Never, Ever Skip Validation After Exposure Assessment

One of the biggest hurdles post-exposure assessment is managing the vast number of vulnerabilities uncovered. While exposure assessment platforms provide prioritization based on factors such as CVSS scores, asset criticality, and business impact, they don’t automatically reduce the number of vulnerabilities to be addressed.

Adversarial Exposure Validation fills the gap between assessment and actual mobilization. This determines whether the high-risk vulnerabilities are, in fact, exploitable in your environment. 

For example, consider that there is a vulnerability rated 9 with the CVSS score factored in for compensating controls and your network posture. In this case, it might be reassessed down to a risk of 3. This adjustment would indicate that although the vulnerability remains of concern, it may not necessarily require immediate remediation. This risk assessment would, in turn, enable you to prioritize mobilization efforts much better. The identified high-risk vulnerabilities, which are scoring between 8 and 10 on a 1-to-10 scale, should be urgently attended to—ideally within 24 hours. Whereas on the other hand, vulnerabilities rated low, at say 3, can be scheduled for remediation over some time, like a month, based on your organization's remediation strategy.

Hence, without validation, you will be wasting precious resources on vulnerabilities that may not pose an imminent danger; this is an exceptionally uneconomical way of using your time and efforts. Thus, the phase of Adversarial Exposure Validation makes sure that your team works on vulnerabilities that really need urgent attention, hence optimizing resource allocation besides steering clear of unnecessary work on issues not as critical.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Exposure assessment is not just about identifying vulnerabilities; it’s about gaining a deep understanding of your entire risk landscape and taking proactive, well-informed actions. By integrating exposure assessment into your security processes, prioritizing and validating findings, and ensuring that your team understands its essential role within your broader security strategy, you can shift from merely reacting to threats to managing them proactively and strategically.

However, it's important to remember that there are no shortcuts in this process. While it may seem tempting to skip steps or rush through validation, doing so leaves your organization vulnerable to significant risks. Without thorough validation and effective prioritization, you may find yourself overwhelmed by an unmanageable number of vulnerabilities, making it nearly impossible to address the most critical threats.

Approach exposure assessment with the same attention to detail as any other core security process. This ensures that when vulnerabilities are uncovered, they are understood in the proper context, validated for real-world risk, and addressed based on their true importance—ultimately strengthening your organization’s overall security posture.