Why Every SMB Should Shrink Its Attack Surface

Imagine a burglar who wants to break into your home. Think about how they might get in through doors, windows, the garage, a crawlspace, or even a back patio. Now, consider how a cyber criminal might get inside your business network — there are quite a few more windows and doors.

The sum of your business network’s windows and doors represents your business attack surface: all possible entry points for cyber criminals. Your attack surface expands with every new hire, added device, or recently adopted technology, as each creates novel exposure for your business and opportunities for cyber criminals. 

Understanding your attack surface allows your business to explore all the risk and exposure that contributes to weakening that surface. 

What exactly is an attack surface?

Your business’ attack surface comprises various digital, human, and physical assets that, collectively, create exposure to cyber attacks.

Digital assets

Digital, public-facing assets comprise the largest percentage of your SMB’s overall threat profile. Internal risk surfaces include internal networks and user endpoints. Any internal surface vulnerabilities will leave these assets open to attack. Cyber criminals may access a user endpoint, such as a desktop or smartphone, or a network directly, leading to company and system-wide ransomware attacks. 

External risk surfaces include the vulnerabilities and risks of an organization's digital assets that are accessible to the public, such as SaaS applications, cloud services, and third-party vendors. Consider SaaS applications hosted by a third-party provider, not within an internal network. These applications may be a security risk due to weak passwords or poor access management, which can lead to phishing attacks.

Human assets

Your business’s attack surface risk also includes employees. Cyber criminals target employees in phishing attacks by tricking them into revealing sensitive information or clicking on malicious links. They also use fraudulent transfer, or funds transfer fraud, when an attacker convinces an employee to transfer money into their account rather than to the actual vendor. These employee-centered attacks expand a business’s attack surface and, like with digital assets, often lead to larger organization-wide ransomware attacks.

Physical assets

Physical risks include servers, lost or stolen devices, and unauthorized physical access to an office or endpoint device, such as a laptop, mobile device, or hardware. Weak passwords with no multi-factor authentication (MFA) are often stored in devices, creating risk, compromising your attack surface, and allowing cyber criminals into your systems and network to launch ransomware and other cyber attacks.

Your business’ attack surface comprises various digital, human, and physical assets that, collectively, create exposure to cyber attacks.

Why SMBs are at high risk

Like most organizations, SMBs have an ever-expanding digital footprint, including changing work models to remote and hybrid schedules, cloud services, and third-party integrations. These increase access points and exposure, creating attack surface weaknesses. 

Understanding your growing digital footprint is an ongoing exercise and requires a proactive approach.

This presents a challenge for SMBs with limited IT and security resources. Many of these businesses' primary focus may be on day-to-day operations rather than longer-term strategies. An expanding and changing digital footprint is at odds with the day-to-day, increasing an SMB's risk.

Like most organizations, SMBs have an ever-expanding digital footprint, including changing work models to remote and hybrid schedules, cloud services, and third-party integrations.

Technologically savvy cyber criminals scan SMB infrastructure for weak points in their attack surfaces. With sophisticated tools, they identify open access points due to weak credentials, outdated or unpatched software, or obsolete accounts.

Limited resources, a dynamic digital footprint, and more determined cyber criminals contribute to high risk and threaten the security of your business' attack surface.

How to minimize your attack surface

Your business can address its attack surface by going through a series of steps known as attack surface management (ASM). ASM is a disciplined way to minimize your attack surface, a continuous process of discovering, monitoring, analyzing, and reducing potential risks to eliminate potential attack vectors — the path to gaining unauthorized access. 

Step 1: Identify all assets

Start by identifying every asset across your entire IT ecosystem (physical and digital). This inventory includes all hardware, software, networks, and devices connected to your systems. It's also essential to assess how components are used and how all assets are associated. 

Include any assets from third-party vendors and partner integrations that interface with your networks, endpoints, and systems. These mean additional risk and increase your attack surface. 

Step 2: Eliminate unnecessary exposure

Turn off unused accounts, devices, and services, including removing and deactivating obsolete online accounts, physical devices, old accounts, or subscription services. 

Enforcing least-privilege access also reduces exposure. This is a known security principle in which a system restricts users' access privileges to the minimum required to accomplish their jobs.

Step 3: Reduce internal and external attack vectors

Regularly report and patch software vulnerabilities. Unpatched vulnerabilities are exploitable entry points and become attack vectors for cyber criminals, weakening your attack surface. 

Use strong authentication methods, such as MFA and password managers. MFA is a secondary authentication method that verifies a user’s identity before allowing system, network, or device login. Verification methods may be something you have, like a text message code, something you know, like a password or PIN, or something you are, like a fingerprint or facial recognition. 

A password manager is like a digital safe that encrypts and stores your passwords and other sensitive data. Users have one password to access the password manager rather than many for each device, system, and network. 

You can also minimize risk by restricting public-facing services and monitoring exposed assets. They can reduce exposure by only allowing outside access to essential public-facing services. You can also use MFA for public services and deploy web application firewalls (WAFs) to scan for malicious traffic and web application vulnerabilities. Finally, isolating public-facing systems from internal networks will limit any parallel malicious activities in case of a breach. 

Step 4: Strengthen employee awareness

Security awareness training can help your employees recognize and identify the signs of deceptive phishing tactics, such as email scams, fraudulent invoices, and other social engineering attacks.

Implementing and enforcing cybersecurity policies, such as device management and safe browsing practices, helps minimize your attack surfaces. Device management ensures computers, phones, and other devices are secure, up-to-date, and compliant with your policies, protecting the network and data from unauthorized access.

Step 5: Continuously monitor and improve 

Attack surfaces continuously grow and change with new hires, technologies, and platforms. SMBs that conduct regular security audits will maintain an up-to-date picture of their attack surface by monitoring for new weaknesses and regularly improving security profiles. 

Regular security audits involve compliance audits, which evaluate how well an SMB’s security meets industry regulations. Risk assessment audits detect potential threats and the possibility of an associated attack. Vulnerability audits use scanners and code evaluation to identify vulnerabilities. 

Automated tools for attack surface discovery and management can continuously monitor and improve your attack surface. Various platforms, such as automated scanning and data collection, can identify and constantly monitor your external digital assets, revealing potential vulnerabilities and risks across the entire attack surface. 

Attack surface management is a disciplined way to minimize your attack surface and eliminate potential attack vectors.

How Coalition Security can help minimize your attack surface

Every SMB has an attack surface; the key is making it as small as possible. ASM is not a one-time effort but a continuous process because as your business grows and changes, so will your attack surface. Take the necessary steps, not once but as a regular exercise, to ensure your attack surface is as minimal and protected as possible.

Coalition Control

Coalition Control® is an AI-powered cyber risk management platform that gives visibility into your business' attack surface and allows you to take action before they become attacks. Included in Coalition Control’s offerings are the following:

Security Awareness Training

Coalition Security Awareness Training* works with Coalition Control and is designed for SMBs to educate their employees on cyber threats, how to reduce cyber risk, and how to help meet compliance requirements using real-life stories and live phishing simulations. 

With security awareness training, you can empower your employees to identify and report possible cyber incidents, like phishing attacks, and practice cybersecurity best practices.

Managed Detection and Response 

While minimizing attack surfaces can help reduce your business' security risk, it doesn't eliminate all threats. Coalition Managed Detection & Response (MDR)* fills these gaps in several ways. It delivers continuous 24/7 monitoring of your IT environment checking for attack surface threats.

Threat detection and real-time response to incidents allow faster action to stop an attack and remediate should an incident occur. Finally, human cybersecurity experts review and analyze attack patterns to deliver visibility of potential threats, flag endpoints for review, and stop attacks.

Ready to minimize your attack surface with increased visibility, strengthened security, and less cyber risk? Coalition Security™ has everything you need to get there.

*Coalition Security and Coalition MDR are provided by Coalition Incident Response (d/b/a Coalition Security), a wholly owned affiliate of Coalition, Inc. Coalition Security does not provide insurance products. The purchase of a Coalition insurance policy is not required to purchase MDR or any other Coalition Security service. 

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