From Chaos to Clarity: Effective Attack Surface Management with Cortex Xpanse

Attack surface management, or ASM, is critical to modern cybersecurity strategies. As organizations grow and evolve, their attack surfaces also expand, making it increasingly challenging to identify, manage and secure exposed assets. Palo Alto's Cortex Xpanse offers a comprehensive solution to this problem by providing continuous visibility into internet-facing assets, automated discovery and ongoing risk assessment.

To truly understand the value of ASM using Cortex Xpanse, it's essential to consider the real-world challenges faced by enterprises and different organizations. Each stage represents a technical implementation and a transformation of how security teams should operate together to manage the attack surface and improve communication between disciplines holistically.

Stage 1: Chaos - discovery and inventory

Imagine your traditional enterprise, where IT, developers and security teams have limited communication with each other. Shadow IT is rampant. For example, the marketing team may be outsourcing product websites to third parties; this could include developers and even individual teams that are spinning up cloud resources — only a credit card number away and can be deployed instantly — without central oversight. The security operations center (SOC) is often blindsided when an untracked application becomes a point of compromise.

Cortex Xpanse's discovery process bridges the gap by continuously identifying assets, including those created without IT's knowledge and approval. This empowers management to compile a comprehensive inventory, while SOC analysts receive alerts when new assets appear. Cortex Xpanse can assist security, compliance and DevOps teams with:

Automated discovery: Continuously scans the internet to discover assets, even rogue or unapproved ones, and maps them to your organization.
Comprehensive inventory: Automatically compiles a list of internet-facing assets, including IPs, domains and certificates.
Shadow IT detection: Identifies unmanaged assets, reducing risks associated with unmonitored infrastructure.

Stage 2: Establishing control - initial risk assessment

After compiling the inventory and verifying against the configuration management database (CMDB), organizations must prioritize the identified risks. At this point, the security team can become easiy overwhelmed, as every discovered asset seems critical and distinguishing between high-risk and low-risk assets is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Cortex Xpanse can assist the SOC and compliance teams with the following:

Risk scoring: Automatically applies risk scores based on exposure and vulnerability data.
Asset classification: Groups assets based on criticality, improving prioritization.
Policy violations: Detects assets violating internal security policies.

It is also recommended that an asset tagging system be verified or defined during this stage to distinguish development, staging and production assets.

Stage 3: Reducing exposure - remediation and mitigation

The remediation stage reveals gaps in the organization's patch management and deployment processes. Even when vulnerabilities are identified, coordinating responses between IT and security teams is challenging. Meanwhile, business units resist downtime for patching critical systems. Cortex Xpanse can assist DevOps and compliance teams with the following:

Patch integration: Facilitates automatic updates and vulnerability remediation using the Active Response Module.
Automated playbooks: Uses predefined steps to resolve common exposures to development and staging environments.
Risk reduction: Continuously monitors asset configurations and hardening systems.

Stage 4: Maintaining clarity - ongoing monitoring and maintenance

As organizations evolve, new assets are continuously introduced. SOC analysts struggle to keep up with alerts, and without historical context, it becomes difficult to identify patterns or recurring issues. Cortex Xpanse can assist the SOC and compliance teams with the following:

Continuous monitoring: Tracks changes in the attack surface in real-time.
Alerting and notification: Sends alerts when critical assets or services are exposed.
Trend analysis: Provides historical insights to track attack surface evolution and improvement.

Stage 5: Full clarity - advanced automation and orchestration

As attack surface management programs mature, security teams aim to minimize the need for human intervention through automation. However, there's a concern that automation might miss nuanced threats or cause unintended consequences. Cortex Xpanse can assist with the following:

Automated patching: Using Cortex XSOAR or XSIAM integration to automate patching based on risk scores.
Orchestrated response: Combines Xpanse data with the Cortex XDR Agent for threat detection and compensating controls.
Policy automation: Enforces security and deployment policies to reduce human error.

Conclusion

Achieving expert-level attack surface management with Cortex Xpanse requires a structured approach that starts with discovery and evolves into automated, proactive management. By leveraging Xpanse's capabilities at each stage, organizations can reduce their attack surface and secure their internet-facing assets effectively.

To learn more about Cortex Xpanse and how it can transform your organization's asset management, contact your account team for a demo or further information.