The proliferation of cyber-attacks is keeping organizations on their toes. While taking necessary security measures is critical, adding more cyber assets into their infrastructure is overwhelming for organizations. In fact, as per a report from JupiterOne titled “, The 2022 State of Cyber Assets Report,” around 97 % of all security findings are associated with cloud assets, increasing the attack surface of the organization. The report analyzed over 370 million assets across 1,300 organizations. It highlights the results of the present state of enterprise cyber assets that include cloud workloads, networks, devices, data, apps, and users.
Below are the major findings from the report:
The continuous attack surface is putting organizations at risk
The present enterprise technology ecosystem is rapidly transformed by API-first, cloud-first, and digital transformation initiatives that come at a high cost to security. With more assets being deployed into enterprise production environments, organizations are increasingly under the risk of a cyber-attack that begins by exploiting unknown, poorly managed internet-facing assets. Moreover, the modern attack surface is continuously exploding, making it difficult for security professionals to effectively manage manual methodologies for the asset lifecycle.
Security teams have to secure too many assets
The security teams are severely understaffed. In fact, as per the report, modern security teams are now responsible for over 165,000 cyber assets that include cloud workloads, network assets, applications, data assets, and users. With the shortage of cybersecurity talent, organizations should take initiatives to support their existing teams to become more efficient.
Also Read: Are Enterprises Ready for Modern Cyber Threats?
Cloud is complex
Around 90% of device assets in the present organization are cloud-based. This means, cloud network assets have outgrown the physical assets and networks by a ratio of 60:1. Yet, as per the report from JupiterOne, around ten million security policies indicate that cloud-specific devices comprise less than 30 percent of the total devices.
By understanding the asset relationships, organizations are able to improve their relationships between users, critical data, devices, and networks. Moreover, critical data and sensitive information are among the most related types of assets, with 105 million first-degree relationships to users, apps, devices, and workloads. The analysis further uncovered that around 45 million relationships between security findings indicate that many security backlogs consist of findings that are identified as critical vulnerabilities.
Also Read: The Significance of Data Destruction for Data Security
A few more 2022 SCAR findings include:
- On average, an organization has around 500 cyber assets for every employee, making it mandatory to integrate automation within the process.
- The usage of modern devices is increasing at a much faster rate. Moreover, over 90 % of today’s device inventories are cloud-based.
- Today’s modern DevOps teams utilize network interfaces to route traffic between subnets that host load balancers, proxy servers, and network address translation (NAT) services. Static IP addresses comprise less than one percent of the network assets, while network interfaces comprise 56 percent.
- Today’s organizations are more vulnerable to software supply chain attacks since only nine percent of all applications are homegrown or developed in-house, while 91 percent of the code running in the enterprise was built by third parties.
Dealing with emerging issues in the cybersecurity space requires organizations to invest in cloud-native security tools that enable them to automate as well as make data-driven decisions. This will also allow organizations to gain visibility of the cyber assets well as their relationships within the enterprise infrastructure.
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