Introduction
Maximizing visibility of your assets and managing your attack surface are cornerstones to having a strong, fundamental security posture in your organization. With the implementation of new technologies, cloud platforms, applications, etc., comes the addition of a variety of distinct asset types. As a result, new threats also emerge as systems and other asset types become more complex and harder to monitor.
With this reality, it is essential to invest in technology that can minimize the security gaps. However, this oftentimes leads to reduced efficiency in workloads that require the management and monitoring of multiple security solutions which can lead to confusing workflows that result in gaps being left vulnerable.
Luckily, this inefficiency and gap can be solved by using a CAASM platform that compiles and enriches the asset data provided by your other security solutions into a single source of truth.CAASM solutions add efficiency that individual security tools cannot provide by visualizing and mapping your entire network of assets, identifying their relationships, detecting vulnerability gaps, automating repetitive tasks and receiving reports with actionable recommendations,. Continue reading this guide to discover how CAASM solutions can take your security strategy to the next level, ensuring all your assets remain protected.
What is Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM)?
CAASM, or Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management, is a sophisticated solution designed to offer organizations a panoramic view of their security assets, how they are related, and their relevant threat exposures. This technology is an all-in-one solution to maximize asset visibility while minimizing vulnerabilities and your attack surface.
To understand what CAASM is, we first need to define what your attack surface and your cyber assets are. According to NIST, assets are anything of value for an organization, a holistic definition we at Hubble agree with. These can include tangible as well as intangible items.
On the other hand, your attack surface is the collection of points through which a hacker could try to enter your system without authorization. CAASM can solve your vulnerability issues as it seeks to keep your assets protected by looking for gaps in current security tools and the existence of vulnerabilities in your most critical locations. This visibility allows security teams to prioritize the remediation of the most critical threats and vulnerabilities, shrinking an organization’s overall attack surface.
Benefits of CAASM
Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management is a relatively new concept, and Gartner states that it will disrupt the industry in the following years, as it will provide organizations with continuous cyber asset visibility while minimizing vulnerabilities. With the expansion of the attack surface due to the growth of new technologies, CAASM can be the key to maintaining a strong security posture that is continuously adapting to the ever-evolving threat landscape.
The main difference between CAASM and traditional asset management strategies is its holistic approach. Security teams usually analyze their systems with a combination of tools, but CAASM is an all-in-one solution that merges all this information into a single platform, enriching the data of single solutions to provide recommendations to improve your organization’s security, making the process far more effective, less time-consuming and complete.
This brings about several benefits:
Enhanced visibility into digital assets
Thanks to its ability to compile data from different sources, CAASM allows security teams to dive deep into their digital assets, identifying, categorizing and mapping them to everything else on the network. Understanding not only what your assets are but also how they are interrelated is a necessary step to identifying and prioritizing the remediation of vulnerabilities.
Identifying vulnerable points in the network
Understanding your attack surface and managing digital assets as a whole helps in taking your security posture to the next level. Dealing with the attack surface in its entirety helps detect vulnerable spots more efficiently, making remediation easier.
Proactive risk mitigation and threat response
Tracking changes and keeping continuous control over your attack surface and your assets allows for more effective vulnerability remediation, minimizing risks while simultaneously dealing with potential attacks quickly.
Compliance adherence and regulatory requirements
Different industries must comply with specific regulatory requirements, and having a complete and enriched picture of your assets will help you stay in line with these standards. Making compliance one of your priorities will ensure that you don’t undergo financial or legal consequences.
Cost-effectiveness and resource optimization
Optimize your resources by utilizing a CAASM solution that helps you automate repetitive tasks. This way, your security teams can focus on human-required remediation rather than processes that can be automated, such as the prioritization of workloads. This point is beneficial not only in terms of operational efficacy but also from a business perspective, ensuring resources are best assigned to tasks that truly require their knowledge and expertise to be successful.
Key features and capabilities of CAASM solutions
Though different CAASM solutions offer distinct advantages and features, there are foundational components that any CAASM solution should include.
Asset discovery and inventory management
CAASM solutions allow for asset identification, enrichment and mapping. These aspects are fundamental to ensuring asset visibility, a foundational pillar for a strong security and vulnerability management program.
Vulnerability assessment and risk prioritization
After you have a single source of truth about your assets, the next step is to analyze how vulnerable they are within your digital ecosystem. With CAASM, detect vulnerabilities and gaps within your network and prioritize their remediation based on the factors such as asset criticality and security tool deployment.
Continuous monitoring and automated remediation
An organization’s attack surface is constantly changing and as a result, an organization’s security strategy should constantly change, too. As attack surfaces grow and new assets are added to your inventory, they should be analyzed within your security controls to ensure they are meeting expectations and don’t have any significant security gaps present.
Reporting and analytics functionalities
Receive continuous feedback on your overall security posture as it relates to your assets and digital ecosystem and recieve near-real time recommendations on how to remediate gaps in a timely manner. Based on this intelligence, adapt your strategies continuously to reduce the risk of cyber attacks.
Integration capabilities with existing security tools
Integrating different security tools is essential to ensure that no blind spots exist within your organization. Incorporate the existing tools from your tech stack into your CAASM solution to enrich asset data and have a single solution to go to when you need to understand your assets and digital ecosystem.
How does CAASM differ from other technologies?
| ASM | Attack Surface Management Centers on the attack surface based on known asset |
|---|---|
| EASM | External Attack Surface Management Focuses on external-facing assets (web applications, IP addresses, cloud servers) |
| CSPM | Cloud Security Posture Management Focuses on cloud technologies used for storage and operational tasks |
| DRPS | Digital Risk Protection Service Detect threats internet-wide, like open and dark web and social media |
| CTEM | Continuous Threat Exposure Management Identifying new forms of threats |
| CAASM | Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management All of the above compiled into a single platform |
How to choose the best CAASM provider? (+ quick quiz)
There are several CAASM solutions to choose from in the market with different features and approaches to asset intelligence and management, To find your perfect match, have a look at the following questions to find out what your organization needs and select the right provider accordingly:
Understanding Your Environment:
- What is the composition of my organization’s digital environment? Does it predominantly consist of cloud assets, on-premises devices, or a hybrid? Is this supported by the provider?
- How is my organization currently managing the inventory of its digital assets? Where is this asset inventory data stored?
Security Tools and Integration:
- How many security tools are currently in use within my organization?
- Of the security tools in use, which are essential to integrate into the CAASM platform? Are these supported by the provider? If not, what is their SLA
Team Involvement and Responsibilities:
- Which internal teams will be directly involved with the CAASM platform, and what specific roles will each team play in the asset lifecycle management? How much time will it take them per week to get it set up and to maintain it?
Assessing and Managing Risks:
- What are the most reliable sources for understanding the context of overall business risk as it relates to cyber assets? How does the provider define an asset and does it cover everything we need to determine risk?
- How does the CAASM platform assist in identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities based on the context of my organization’s unique business risks? Are these features out of the box or does it require lots of work by the team
Incident Response and Blast Radius Analysis:
- What methodologies does the CAASM platform offer for assessing the potential impact of a security incident?
- How can the CAASM platform enhance our incident response team’s capabilities in quickly identifying affected assets and mitigating threats?
Aligning with Business Objectives and Outcomes:
- What cybersecurity outcomes are most critical to my organization’s success, and how does the CAASM platform support achieving these outcomes?
- How does the CAASM provider ensure that their platform can adapt to the evolving needs and objectives of my organization?
Scalability and Future Growth:
- How does the CAASM platform accommodate the growth of digital assets as my organization expands or shifts strategies?
- Can the CAASM platform scale to meet future security challenges as the digital landscape evolves?
Regulatory Compliance and Data Privacy:
- How does the CAASM platform help ensure compliance with relevant regulatory requirements and data privacy laws specific to my industry? How can this be leveraged for reporting?
- What measures does the CAASM provider take to protect the privacy and security of my organization’s data?
Vendor Support/Pricing:
- What level of technical support does the CAASM provider offer to ensure smooth deployment and ongoing operations?
- Is the product’s pricing within your budget?
Case studies and industry applications
Hubble’s Aurora can help keep your assets secure at all times. Investing in a CAASM solution is essential throughout a variety of industries due to certain regulatory requirements, the type of data being managed by the organization and the size and complexity of their asset inventory.
Best practices for effective CAASM implementation
Organizations looking to enhance their cybersecurity strategies can invest in a CAASM solution to enrich their vulnerability management approach. Here are some best practices to maximize CAASM’s potential and run a smooth transition.
Establishing clear objectives and goals
Before you start your transformation towards a CAASM solution, it is ideal to understand what disadvantages your current strategy poses and find out how CAASM will address them. To select the right provider, request a demo or free trial to have a support agent answer your questions and see how your organization’s needs can be met.
Conducting comprehensive asset mapping and classification
The first step in integrating a CAASM platform into your security strategy is to identify technologies that you would like the CAASM platform to connect to. Then, once these connectors are set up, the platform will digest the asset data and map their relationships based on the data gathered from a variety of tools in your tech stack. This will help you truly understand your attack surface, and prioritize your security team’s priorities and workloads.
Integrating CAASM into existing cybersecurity frameworks
Integrating CAASM doesn’t mean eliminating your previous strategy and the tools you used, but incorporating them into an actionable process. As mentioned above, CAASM solutions enable you to connect these tools into a single platform to analyze the data as a whole, arriving at more integral conclusions and thus identifying effective actions to take.
Implementing automation for efficient monitoring and response
Some tasks are often repeated when securing and managing assets, which can be time and resource-intensive. When properly set up, CAASM platforms allow for the automation of such tasks, making the repetitive processes more efficient.
Regular assessment and optimization of CAASM strategies
The best thing about having a CAASM platform is that it updates in near-real time once the initial set-up is complete without any human interaction. This way, when a resource needs to log in for specific data, they know that they are looking at the most updated, relevant, enriched information.
Why choose Hubble’s solution?
Here is what makes Hubble’s Aurora different from other CAASM solutions.
Asset definition
Though the NIST defines an asset as anything of value to an organization, many CAASM providers still have a restricted definition for this concept. At Hubble, we support this holistic approach, as it is necessary to understand the organization as a whole, leaving no vulnerable points uncovered.
Customized cybersecurity strategy
Hubble’s Aurora is one of the most customizable platforms on the market, allowing each and every organization to adapt the tool to their needs. Create your own workspaces within the platform based on your specific role and use case.
Asset relationship mapping
In combination with other tools, CAASM offers asset visibility from several sources within the organization. After identifying the assets within your network, Aurora detects the relationships between them, mapping how they are interconnected throughout your organization. This enables teams to understand blast radius and other relationships necessary when responding to incidents and vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability management
Prioritize assets based on their level of vulnerability and risk potential, enabling analysts to prioritize their workloads just by looking at the Comprehensive Vulnerability Dashboard, which collects all the necessary information at just one glance. Learn more about Aurora and its uses in vulnerability management here.
Gap identification & prioritization
Once weak points in your attack surface have been identified, Hubble can categorized and prioritized these gaps based on their potential impact on your organization.
Remediation actions
With Hubble, receive feedback on the necessary remediation actions to remediate vulnerabilities and security gaps. Continuous reporting is available in the platform for sustained monitoring and vulnerability detection.
What is an example of a cyber asset?
Assets are anything that provides intrinsic value to an organization such as a laptop or a person—the examples are endless.
What is a CAASM?
CAASM stands for Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management, and is a platform used to help manage an organization’s attack surface by understanding all of the assets that are present throughout the organization’s network.
How does CAASM work?
CAASM is an all-in-one solution that compiles asset data from different software tools within organizations’ tech stacks to analyze them all as a whole, with enriched context, in order to best understand your attack surface.
What are the key components of a CAASM cybersecurity?
Through its capabilities to integrate with your current tech stack, Hubble’s Aurora allows security teams to map and visualize assets, identify gaps and inconsistencies, automate repetitive security tasks, and improve and report on their security posture by recommending immediate remediation thanks to its near real-time monitoring.
What is the difference between vulnerability management and CAASM?
Vulnerability Management (VM) and Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) are two distinct concepts in the field of cybersecurity, each focusing on different aspects of protecting an organization’s digital infrastructure.
