Microsoft Security Exposure Management for enhanced security posture

Security posture refers to an organization’s strength of protection over its networks, data, and systems (hardware and software). It measures how vulnerable your organization is to cyber-attacks or data breaches.

The cyber landscape is becoming more perilous with increasing threat actors, faster phishing attacks, and more password attacks. Cyber jobs are harder due to regulatory updates, numerous security tools, and open jobs. Organizations face exposure with critical assets and open attack paths.

Microsoft Security Exposure Management transforms the attack surface by providing tools to discover, assess, and reduce risk with confidence. It integrates with various Microsoft Defender products and offers a unified view of internal and external exposure, potential attack paths, and critical asset protection.

Proactively protecting your organization from potential data breaches is more effective than just doing damage control once a breach occurs.

Scoping - Make a plan

A well-defined plan is essential for effective exposure management. Your plan should outline the purpose and objectives of posture management for your organization, aligning with legal and regulatory requirements and the risks to your organization's goals. Identify internal stakeholders and important external parties and establish clear roles and responsibilities.

Discovery - Find vulnerabilities

The Discovery step identifies vulnerabilities within your infrastructure. This involves scanning networks, systems, and applications for potential weaknesses. By regularly conducting vulnerability assessments, you can stay ahead of emerging threats and ensure your security posture remains strong.

We recommend that you maintain an up-to-date inventory of your assets, including on-premises resources, cloud resources, and endpoints. Work with security governance teams to ensure assets are properly tagged and inventories are current. This helps incident responders quickly identify and address security issues.

Education and training

Security posture management is a complex topic that requires a wide range of technical knowledge. Continuously educate and train your operations and incident response staff on Exposure Management technologies and how your organization uses them. This ensures your team is prepared to handle security incidents effectively.

The evolution of vulnerability management includes TI-Based, Risk-Based, and Exposure Management stages. Continuous exposure management involves attack surface management, attack path analysis, and unified exposure insights. Microsoft integrates exposure management data across Defender products to enhance security posture.

Incident classification framework

Define what constitutes a "security incident" for your organization and develop a method for classifying incidents. A classification framework helps prioritize response and preparation activities, collect useful metrics, and improve the performance of your posture management program. Categories might include denial of service, malware, or unauthorized access, with impact-based severity levels such as critical, high, medium, or low.

Assess your security posture

Use Exposure Management to get a comprehensive view of your organization's security posture, including key metrics, critical assets, and potential vulnerabilities. Exposure Management provides a 360-degree view of your security landscape, helping you understand and quantify your attack surface exposure.

Learn more here, What is Microsoft Security Exposure Management?

Identify attack entry points

Exposure Management helps you identify and map out potential attack paths, giving you visibility into critical choke points that need to be addressed. This proactive approach allows you to close down attack paths before they can be exploited.

80% of organizations have at least one open attack path to a critical asset. 61% of attack paths lead to sensitive user accounts. Only 1% of total assets in organizations are critical or sensitive.

Learn more here, Overview of attack surface management

Prioritize remediation efforts

Focus on the most critical vulnerabilities and attack paths first. Exposure Management provides recommendations for remediation actions to help you prioritize your efforts. This ensures that your resources are used effectively to mitigate the most significant risks.

Learn more here, Review security recommendations

Validation – Test and confirm fixes

Incorporate the Validation step to test and confirm that remediation efforts effectively address identified vulnerabilities. This involves conducting penetration tests and security audits to ensure that vulnerabilities are properly mitigated and that the fixes are effective.

Key considerations for users

For users new to Exposure Management, it's important to understand the following benefits:

• Comprehensive view: Exposure Management provides a 360-degree view of your organization's security posture, helping you understand the overall security landscape.
• Prioritization: Focus on the most critical vulnerabilities and attack paths first to maximize the impact of your remediation efforts.
• Continuous monitoring: Exposure Management continuously monitors your threat exposure and provides updates on your security posture.

For users with an established posture program, consider the following advanced features:

• Integration: Exposure Management integrates with existing security tools and solutions, providing a unified view of your security posture.
• Advanced metrics: Utilize advanced security metrics and insights provided by Exposure Management to fine-tune your security strategies.
• Collaboration: Work with different teams within your organization to ensure a coordinated approach to exposure management.

A great starting point for any user is to set a specific goal. For instance, you might choose to enhance Ransomware Protection initiative by 20%. Use Exposure Management metrics and recommendations to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities that could be exploited by ransomware attacks to achieve this improvement.

Ensuring your security posture

Maintaining a robust security posture is essential for safeguarding your organization's networks, data, and systems against cyber threats. By using tools like Exposure Management, you can gain a comprehensive view of your security landscape, identify critical vulnerabilities, and prioritize remediation efforts effectively. Continuous monitoring and proactive measures are key to staying ahead of potential threats and ensuring that your security posture remains strong. Following the guidelines outlined here and fostering a culture of security awareness, your organization can better protect itself from cyber-attacks and data breaches, building trust with customers and stakeholders.