Anatomy of an external attack surface: Five Elements Organisations Should Monitor

The cybersecurity world continues to become more complex as organisations move to the cloud and shift to decentralised work. The sheer scale of now-common global security issues has radically shifted our perception of comprehensive security. Despite its almost unfathomable size, security teams must defend their organisation’s presence across the internet to the same degree as everything behind their firewalls. As such, it’s increasingly critical for organisations to understand the full scope of their attack surface.

For security teams, the sheer depth and breadth of what they need to defend may seem daunting. However, one way to put the scope of their organisation’s attack surface into perspective is to think about the internet from an attacker’s point of view. Below Microsoft highlighted five areas that help better frame the challenges of effective external attack-surface management.

1. The global attack surface may be bigger than most think
2. Sometimes, threat actors know more about an organization’s attack surface than their SOC does
3. Threat actors don’t have to compromise assets to attack an organisation or its customers
4. The mobile attack surface goes beyond major mobile app stores
5. Threat infrastructure is more than what’s on the network

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