How to Defend Your Expanding Attack Surface

There are plenty of benefits to innovative new technologies, from greater efficiency to cost savings to customer satisfaction. It is rare, however, for a new technology to truly replace existing IT – rather, it gets incorporated into or bolted onto current systems.

This approach, along with the explosion of mobile devices and proliferation of software and SaaS applications, dramatically increases and clouds an Agency’s cyber footprint and attack surface. It is hard to maintain an accurate inventory that records hundreds of thousands of assets, their relationships and dependencies, or to track their vulnerabilities and spot cybersecurity gaps. And while prioritizing risks and mitigation efforts is essential, the increasingly complex IT landscape makes it ever more difficult.

Learning Objectives:

• Review some of the main drivers behind current attack surface expansion, as well as upcoming challenges that will continue to broaden the reach of cyber environments
• Outline ways that implementing a zero trust architecture as new technologies are incorporated into existing systems can lower the danger of successful cyber attacks
• Identify ways to find and manage unsanctioned, unmanaged, and shadow SaaS apps, mitigate configuration issues and suspicious behaviors