A stronger formula for defending against cyber threats

How can you defend something if you don’t know what it is? For one sustainable global chemicals company, that question has become increasingly important as the cyber threat landscape has intensified as its business has evolved—with more digital data, processes, systems, and applications.

Despite its digital evolution, the company did not have a proper balance between transformation and business—in particular, its ability to understand and manage its growing organizational attack surface. Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activities exacerbated the problem, as IT was not as involved in all stages of the M&A process. The growing digital footprint of the company—as well as points of on-premises and cloud vulnerabilities and reliance on third-party services and solutions—created an expansive attack surface that was difficult to assess and manage.

That lack of visibility created real and growing risks, providing ample opportunity for attackers to exploit unknown assets vulnerabilities, find a way into the company’s systems, and wreak havoc—from stealing sensitive data to launching ransomware attacks.

Though the company had engaged a vendor to assist with their attack surface management (ASM) program, leaders understood that they needed to do more—and do it faster, to keep pace with the evolution of threats and the business. Leaders wanted to do more than identify vulnerabilities. They wanted to ensure they could remediate the associated risks while staying ahead of trends and potential cyberattacks.

To enable the company to manage its attack surface on an ongoing basis, Deloitte worked with the company to create foundational governance for the program—covering procedures for vulnerability triaging, remediation, and remediation validation. Developed rapidly using a proprietary Deloitte accelerator, the governance framework and its associated “run book” provided guidance for addressing needs such as triage and escalation of issues, plus detailed steps for remediation.

Analytics have been a key component of the ASM program. Specifically, Deloitte analysts created operational reporting dashboards and deployed other reporting tools that provide insights into ASM-related trends. Those insights have allowed the client to proactively identify and address issues—such as new types of exposure or a growing need for a particular cybersecurity skillset. Deloitte also helped the company increase the efficiency of an existing third-party vulnerability management scanning solution, which has been central to the ongoing ASM program.

With core components of the program in place, the company is looking to build on its new capabilities, with plans to automate reporting and increase integration between attack surface management and other cybersecurity functions. In the meantime, the company is realizing a host of benefits from the ASM transformation—from increased risk visibility to improved business resilience to greater confidence for ongoing innovation.