As previously we talked briefly about digital footprint and how to manage it in our blog 4 Ways To Manage Enterprise Digital Footprint. Here we will talk in details about how to Secure Enterprise digital footprints. An Enterprise Digital Footprint is an inventory of all the digital assets over internet (web, mobile, individual, social etc) related to an enterprise which was exposed to internet intentionally or sometimes unintentionally.
Digital assets which are exposed intentionally are the attack surface you are aware about and can take necessary steps to make it secure. But the digital assets which your enterprise exposes to internet unintentionally is hard to secure as you don’t have a track of it officially. This exposes your digital attack surface to hackers and creates soft targets for them.
In 2007, AOL security researcher William Salusky and his team discovered one of the first instances of malvertising — a digital ad running on aol.com had been configured to serve up malware to unsuspecting visitors. This turned out to be the beginning of a new era where attackers use a company’s digital footprint to distribute malware and commit fraud. This got enterprises attention to monitor their digital footprint and secure them.
4 Steps To Secure Enterprise Digital Footprints (Unknown Unknowns):
1- Discover Enterprise Digital Footprints
As organisations are more focused on empowering departments so that they can fulfil their business objective. Local departments like marketing etc. buys a domain and launch website/application without informing security/IT teams. CISOs are losing visibility of what to secure and what not.
So, first step is to discover the unknown digital assets (domains, subdomains, IPs, applications, etc) to get a visibility of what a CISO/security team should secure. FierShadows uses a headless browser infrastructure which collects the information about an enterprise by scanning through all 3+ billion IPs (whole internet).
2- Create An Inventory Of All Your External Digital Assets
It’s useful maintain an inventory of all the digital assets, so that security team can easily check for security updates , vulnerability testing, and required patch management.
Also enterprises should manage their new assets launched in their inventory. So they can easily manage all of their up to date external digital assets.
3- Prioritise Digital Assets To Take Actions Required To Secure Digital Attack Surface
Enterprises are generating a lot of data these days . It’s been estimated that, by 2020, firms will manage 28 zettabytes of data, and almost 11 zettabytes of that data will be generated by them. Now with this huge digital assets inventory on the place, one can decide their focus, and prioritize the action based on the critically and business requirement.
4- Monitor Enterprise Digital Footprints Continuously
Just having the inventory of digital assets is not helpful. Enterprises should monitor their digital footprints for any vulnerability etc. and take required action to resolve all those issues.
