There is a hacker attack every 39 seconds and if you don’t know what to protect, then how could you protect it?

Digital Footprint is the information about the organization that exists on the Internet due to their online activity. Organizations’ digital footprints are expanding and changing at a formidable rate. Employees, suppliers and other third parties are exposing sensitive information without their knowledge. This sensitive data can leave organizations exposed and are used by attackers to exploit organizations. By continuous monitoring and managing their digital footprint and their attackers, organizations can manage to reduce their external digital risks. External Digital Risk Management helps organizations in continuous monitoring for risks in surface, deep and dark web and helps them quickly respond to these risks. 

Most Dangerous Causes of Security Breaches:

  • Applications used by teams unknown to security team(Shadow IT)
  • Attacks on Unknown or orphaned applications, database, APIs & Misconfigured Cloud Assets
  • Lack of visibility on entry points for a hacker (through internet exposed assets & infrastructure)

The top 4 ways to mitigate risks through digital footprint monitoring are

  1. Understand Your Digital Exposure & Shadow IT
  2. Mitigate Shadow IT Risks

  3. Prioritize Your Remediation Efforts
  4. Monitor Continuously

Attackers have their techniques to exploit the exposed digital assets and ineffective security solutions. Digital attacks expose the organization’s sensitive information, and sometimes these attackers trade this information in Dark Web forums.

  • Understand Your Digital Exposure & Shadow IT:

Attackers focus on the digital presence to gain access to customer’s credentials and the organization’s sensitive data. You need to have continuous visibility into your entire digital ecosystem. You need to discover an organization’s ever-changing digital footprint including shadow IT, unknown exposed databases, cloud buckets, code leaks, exposed credentials, risky cloud assets and open ports, etc. This means you must be able to validate and manage your digital footprint across a complex environment.

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  • Mitigate Shadow IT Risks:

As an organization, you need to track all the exposed digital assets and internet-facing digital assets including Identifying exposed documents & files, Identifying compromised / malicious infrastructure and Identifying exposed services like APIs and RDP.

  • Prioritize Your Remediation Efforts

You need to prioritize digital risks to focus efforts on the vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited. Having a dashboard summarizing the high, medium, and low priority risks and mitigation recommendation steps is very useful. For example, you should prioritize remediating any incidents that involve crown jewels or a critical asset with a high risk of breach.

>>Get a Free Report on the Your Digital Exposure

  • Monitor Continuously

Continuous monitoring provides near real-time view of your digital footprint and risks associated. Monitoring the deep, dark and surface web using nation-state grade reconnaissance techniques and real-time alerts to the right teams help you to identify risks and mitigate them before being exploited.

Reference:

https://www.firecompass.com/blog/top-4-risks-that-can-be-mitigated-through-digital-footprint-monitoring-2/

https://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/files/whitepapers/digital_shadows-digital_risk_management-wp.pdf

https://www.proofpoint.com/sites/default/files/pfpt-us-eb-are-you-monitoring-and-protecting-you-companys-digital-footprint.pdf

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