We are living in a world that is technologically very connected and dependent on each other.
Take our workplace, for example, in which we have many different types of software for employee attendance, communication, sending emails, writing and storing documents, fixing grammatical mistakes, and creating images, etc.
Our workplace is interconnected and dependent on companies that make these software. If one of them experiences a cyberattack, then it will have an impact on our workplace too.
Due to the nature of this interconnectedness and dependency, cyberattacks are a collective headache now.
Gartner has coined a term for this, it’s called “Global Attack Surface Grid”.
It is the product of a rapid advancement in technology that is happening in our workplace. The recent one being Generative AI.
It has exposed organisations across the world to cyber risks that none anticipated before.
Relying just on traditional cybersecurity isn’t enough anymore.
Businesses nowadays operate in an environment that is a mixture of old and emerging technologies. They employ hundreds of people, with hundreds of endpoints, with hundreds of software, connected through common networks.
This environment is full of exposures and vulnerabilities, which are weaknesses that an adversary can exploit to breach inside the organization.
Just relying on traditional cybersecurity alone to keep this environment secure is akin to wielding a sword while the adversary is holding a machine gun.
Traditional cybersecurity has become outdated due to its reactive nature. It focuses only on detection and response, which is no longer enough.
To stay safe from current cyber threats, organizations will need to predict cyberattacks beforehand. For this, they will need full visibility into all the exposures that afflict them.
The exploitable attack surface is continuously expanding and now goes beyond IT perimeters. OT, Cloud, and IoT are also being exploited.
With traditional cybersecurity, organizations will find out about exposures only after the cyberattack has already happened. If you look at the major cyberattacks that happened globally, they happened due to an exposure that was exploited, which the affected party was not aware of previously, or decided not to fix, or just couldn’t fix it.
Another issue with traditional cybersecurity is that it focuses on periodic scanning and fixes. It’s not enough due to the massive spike in exposures that businesses are experiencing these days as they gobble up more technology to become more profitable as time passes by.
Lastly, traditional cybersecurity operates in silos, and the security data it generates is disparate. As most organizations purchase security tools from different vendors, they operate independently with their own dashboards and generate logs in their own formats. For a security team, having to constantly switch from different dashboards to see the alerts and then form a correlation out of all the logs, which are in different formats, is tiring.
It also makes it incredibly difficult to take the right call.
On top of all this, the advent of Gen AI is akin to dropping a nuclear bomb.
Cybercriminals now have a potent arrow in their quiver, which traditional cybersecurity cannot deflect.
There is a flood of Gen AI tools in the market. It has evolved to the point where it can perform complex tasks by itself that once required human intervention.
Whether you want to write something, do coding, create images and videos, or summarize a document, the list is endless.
As every company is mandating the use of Gen AI for better productivity, hackers, too, are using Gen AI to sharpen their attacks.
Gen AI has eliminated many of the limitations that existed previously.
Launching cyberattacks is now economical because hackers don’t need a large team with sophisticated skill sets and resources to launch cyberattacks. They can use Gen AI, whether for creating realistic deepfakes, imitating voices, or crafting a perfect phishing email.
Gen AI is also being manipulated into launching cyberattacks. Recently, a group of state-sponsored Chinese hackers manipulated Anthropic’s AI Claude Code into launching a cyberattack on the companies that were using the AI for developer tasks.
A total of 30 companies were targeted.
With the help of MCP tools, the hackers connected with Claude AI, who began to carry out the instructions that the hackers set forth by breaking down the tasks and passing them onto the subagents. The MCP tools were used in scouting and mapping out the attack surface.
After that, Claude AI did everything. It discovered the exposures, exploited them, then moved laterally to harvest credentials, analyzed the data, and exfiltrated it. The hackers only intervened when the AI was at a critical junction and needed authorization to go forward.
The AI didn’t know that the actions it was performing were malicious in nature. This was achieved through carefully crafted prompts and established personas.
This incident shows that organizations will need to brace themselves against more AI driven cyberthreats in the future. They will need to address their exploitable attack surface to stay safe in the global attack surface grid.
This is why unified exposure management platforms are the need of the hour as they will help businesses with attack surface reduction.
As a unified exposure management platform (UEMP), Invinsense OXDR has consolidated exposure assessment and exposure validation technologies. This module of Invinsense plays a core role in continuously identifying exploitable attack surfaces.
Under EAP, Invinsense OXDR has consolidated vulnerability management and attack surface monitoring. Organizations will not only get continuous visibility into all the cyberrisks, but also the context behind every risk.
Under AEV, Invinsense OXDR has consolidated Breach and Attack Simulation, and Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART). Both tools can simulate actual cyberattacks to test an organization's security posture. These tools use the same tactics, techniques, and procedures that adversaries use. They will validate whether the exposures are exploitable in nature or not.
Invinsense OXDR provides coverage to IT, Cloud, OT, and IoT assets.
As a unified cybersecurity platform, organizations can bring forth and consolidate their security tools into our platform, which eliminates integration issues that Gartner highlighted in its report, The Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Global Attack Surface Grid.
“However, adoption of UEMPs is hindered by challenges in integrating diverse tool capabilities, supporting comprehensive asset coverage, and overcoming reliance on legacy tools. Early majority adoption will depend on UEMPs’ ability to deliver seamless integration within organizations’ technology stacks.”
With the OCSF AI converter and data lake, companies can store all their security data in one place and get all the logs in JSON format for quicker decision-making.
In the long run, all this will help security teams prevent breaches as they will be able to find exposures, validate the exploitable ones, and remediate them quickly before the adversary finds and exploits them.
With Invinsense OXDR, businesses will be able to secure themselves in the global attack surface grid.
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