Organized crime, nation states, individual cybercriminals: all organizations face a range of external threats to their data and systems. Growing external attack surfaces also mean that those external threats can more easily find their way into your networks and systems. However, with so many potential threats, it’s not always easy to know exactly which particular threats are targeting your organization. External Threat Detection is a way to take the guesswork out of your cyber defense and get proactive about threat monitoring.
How Does Flare Help with External Threat Detection?
How does Flare answer external threat detection needs?
Your organization’s attack surface is constantly expanding, which makes it difficult for your security team to manually monitor every possible attack vector. Many organizations use a variety of tools to monitor several channels, but still encounter coverage issues. Flare enables you to map your organization’s external attack surface to identify new attack vectors, while monitoring threat intelligence so that you know when threat actors are trying to attack you.
How does Flare help monitor external threats?
Security teams are faced with a lot of noise from threat management tools; irrelevant and unnecessary alerts can slow down your analysts as they try to find the real threats to your organization. Flare’s platform provides high-fidelity, actionable intelligence specific to your organization.
What are the key benefits of the Flare external threat detection solution?
- Visibility: Flare gives you a real-time view of your external attack surface, allowing your security team to focus on high-risk publicly facing assets.
- Proactive monitoring: Flare automates threat detection, monitoring sources on the clear and dark web, as well as illicit Telegram channels for external threats to your organization. This gives you 24/7 proactive monitoring of your external attack surface.
- Relevant threat information: Rather than wasting your team’s time with unnecessary alerts, Flare cuts through the noise, sending only the alerts that matter to your team.
External Threat Detection: An Overview
What are the types of external threats?
External threats are threats from outside an organization; malicious actors that attempt to gain unauthorized access to your networks, systems, and sensitive data. Usually external threat actors exploit vulnerabilities in your system to gain access to your network, then give themselves additional privileges once they are in your system. External threats fall into three basic categories:
- Malware attacks
- Hacking attacks
- Social engineering attacks
Are external threats more common than internal threats?
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Most threats to your data, systems and networks come from outside of your organization. Research shows that 83% of data breaches last year were caused by external actors. Those threats can include a range of external bad actors, including organized crime, business rivals, individual criminals, nation-states, cyber-terrorists, hacktivists, and thrill seekers.
How can external threats be detected?
The best way to find an external threat is by proactively monitoring your attack surface to find vulnerabilities before an external threat actor is able to exploit them. Automated cyber reconnaissance can also alert your team to threat actors who may be targeting your organization.
Why Do You Need External Threat Detection Now?
Why is external threat detection important in today’s cybersecurity landscape?
Two out of three organizations say their external attack surface became larger in the last year. Thanks to the use of the cloud, more interconnected applications, and a growing number of smart devices, the digital footprints of most organizations are always expanding. With those apps and devices, however, come more vulnerabilities for attackers to exploit. Mapping the attack surface is a vital step in securing your data.
What is an attack surface?
Your attack surface includes all the points in a system or application that can be targeted, exploited, or compromised in order to carry out a cyberattack. These points might include vulnerabilities in the software, misconfigurations in the network or system, or human errors such as weak passwords or poor security hygiene.The larger the attack surface, the greater the potential for an attacker to find a vulnerability in the system.
How can your organization protect its attack surface against external threats?
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): Detect abnormal endpoint activity and automate responses to mitigate risks arising from things like ransomware and malware
- Regular patching: Install security updates as soon as they are released to mitigate vulnerabilities.
- Cyber awareness training: Train employees so that they can detect and report phishing attempts.
- Encryption: Encrypt both data-at-rest and data-in-transit to protect data from criminals.
- Dark web monitoring: Scan the dark web and illicit Telegram channels to identify leaked credentials and targeted threats.
External Threat Detection and Flare
Flare provides the leading Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution for organizations. Our technology constantly scans the online world, including the clear & dark web, to discover unknown events, automatically prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security. Automate your external threat detection with Flare, and get proactive about your cybersecurity.
Our solution integrates into your security program in 30 minutes to provide your team with actionable intelligence and automated remediation for high-risk exposure. See it yourself with our free trial.
