Effective cybersecurity can be distilled to a single idea: protect your most business-critical assets. Protecting your most critical assets, in turn, can be distilled to a single process: manage your attack paths effectively.

To understand whether an organisation’s most critical assets are safe, it’s imperative to have visibility into how things change over time, and how those changes affect risk. Modelling attack paths to predict the likelihood of a breach is one way to do this. This approach provides a consistent predictive model that cuts through the noise of what can be bypassed, and what cannot, and contextualises this information within the framework of critical assets.

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So, how do you get there? Below we’ve succinctly characterised the five fundamental aspects of effective attack-path management – and why XM Cyber’s “see all ways” security framework helps you answer the question that keeps chief information security officers up at night.

There is no more urgent challenge than illuminating and breaking key points in the attack paths that threaten your business-critical assets. Here’s how XM Cyber does it:

1. Visibility across the hybrid network

To enable the business to move fast requires continuous risk visibility and agility so that at any point in time you know if new exposures across your hybrid-cloud environment could create a successful attack path to your critical business assets. XM Cyber’s Attack Path Management platform enables real-time visualisation of every possible attack path across hybrid cloud environments. By gaining the attacker perspective, it becomes possible to see how they can move through these environments to threaten your most critical assets.

2. Continuous and safe-attack modelling

We provide continuous and safe awareness of attack paths through continuous attack modelling – with no need to inject malicious code. Unlike traditional pen tests, there are no gaps between testing periods, so you can maintain visibility on a 24/7 basis. Continuous modelling allows for real-time discovery of threats and vulnerabilities with no risk to production.

3. Focus on the chokepoints

XM Cyber helps identify where attack paths converge towards critical assets and allows you to focus remediation efforts there. By continuously uncovering hidden attack paths to your critical assets across cloud and on-premises environments, you can cut them off at key junctures and eradicate risk with a fraction of the effort. We help you manage risk by eliminating chokepoints and directing resources to address the most damaging attack paths first. Often, by eliminating the vulnerability of a single asset, it becomes possible to substantially lower the risk throughout the entire network.

4. Step-by-step guided remediation

XM Cyber improves your resource efficiency by improving operational processes with attack telemetry and enhancing your red/blue teaming or pen testing efforts with automation and continuous monitoring. This is followed by step-by-step remediation guidance that enables you to tackle the most pressing problems first. By combining how attackers can exploit security gaps like misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in relation to your critical assets you can disrupt the opportunity for lateral movement across the network and pinpoint the exact changes needed to quickly eliminate the risk of compromise. This ability to effectively prioritise is an essential aspect of good attack-path management.

5. Risk quantification

XM Cyber helps ensure that you receive the resources you need to keep managing attack paths by helping you demonstrate the return on investment of the XM Cyber solution to your board, and quantify risk, via easy-to-understand reporting and metrics. We enable this through detailed reporting and an executive dashboard. With the XM Cyber solution, you can monitor your security posture daily, demonstrate ROI and identify where changes are needed.

How XM Cyber helps you see all ways – and answer the most important questions in cybersecurity

XM Cyber is the only platform that can show you in real time, all the time, whether an attacker can jeopardise a critical asset. XM Cyber shows all possibilities, all the potential attack vectors, from breach point to critical asset.

How do we do this? XM Cyber’s graph-based simulation technology continuously discovers the attack paths that lead to critical assets, enabling full visibility into organisational security posture. This allows users to understand how vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, user privileges and so on chain together to create an attack path that jeopardises critical assets.

Focusing in on the key intersections where multiple attack paths converge to exploit a critical asset offers more actionable intelligence than receiving a simple vulnerability alert about a single component without any context to the risk it potentially has to the rest of the environment. Without the insights of attack paths threat actors take, and how they can compromise your critical assets, it’s difficult to retain a high security posture and keep an upper hand against your adversaries. By understanding and eliminating chokepoints using XM Cyber attack path management, it becomes possible to manage the risk created by unaddressed attack paths.

All of this is done with a laser-like focus on the question: “Are our critical assets exposed?”

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About XM Cyber
XM Cyber is a leading hybrid-cloud security company that’s changing the way innovative organisations approach cyber risk. By continuously uncovering hidden attack paths to businesses’s critical assets and security-control gaps across cloud and on-prem environments, it enables security teams to remediate exposures at key junctures and eradicate risk with a fraction of the effort. Many of the world’s largest, most complex organisations choose XM Cyber to help eradicate risk. Founded by top executives from the Israeli cyber-intelligence community, XM Cyber has offices in North America, Europe and Israel. For more, visit https://www.xmcyber.com/.