External Cyber Risk/Threat Assessments
Organizations of all sizes, whether they’re for-profit or non-profit, face many cyber threats that target them. One of the mainstays are bad actors that rely on Social Engineering to dupe you or your employees to giving up sensitive information, or system access. This is done either through the various forms of phishing or in person.
We’re sure you’ve seen the news coverage of businesses, schools, hospitals, or towns having their systems shutdown due to ransomware or other extortive means. These attacks are financially devastating to any organization. It can, and does, put organizations out of business.
Other threats include supply chain attacks, reputation damaging disinformation, insider threat, and the use of Artificial Intelligence assisting threat actors in launching various attacks against your organization.
These are some of the malicious things that organizations, such as yours, might encounter.
The non-malicious things that you’ll need to keep up with are data privacy laws and changes to policies from third parties. The most recent being how you send marketing emails to Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Those policy changes from Google and Yahoo! proliferated to email marketing platforms and the likes.
It’s incredibly important to understand what’s happening externally to your business.
With many organizations relying on the cloud for everything from storage, services to help run their business, to infrastructure, to hosting applications, and any other need, there’s bound to be a misconfiguration somewhere. This would allow internal items to end up getting indexed by search engines; which might also let a threat actor find a way into your organization’s networks.
Where you are located geographically is important to understand about what’s going on externally to your organization. There are threat actors that target entities that operate in certain countries. The threat actors seek organizations in their territory that are in certain industries because of the data ,or proprietary information, they have.
Is someone using your intellectual property? Are there fake websites and social media profiles set up spewing disinformation about your organization?
These are a couple of other reasons to understand what’s happening externally to your business.
Why External Cyber Risk/Threat Assessments Matter
As your organization grows, you may find that you have multiple websites for different purposes or you’ve moved some data to cloud storage.
You might jump on the newest popular social media platform because your audience moved over there.
Maybe you’re fortunate to be hiring new employees. Perhaps you’ve lost some along the way too. You might rely on some third party vendors, contractors, and consultants to help keep the lights on.
We’re saying all of this to say that your attack surface expands with everything we mentioned above. There is the potential for something you have internally in the organization to make it’s way to somewhere external to your business. An incident like this could be accidental or intentional.
When you’re dealing with internal cybersecurity risks and threats, there’s many things you have to contend with:
- Technology (Servers, endpoints, switches, firewalls, databases, etc)
- People
- Policies
- Frameworks
- Plans (Business Continuity, Incident Response, Disaster Recovery)
You’re identifying security gaps on the inside, addressing said gaps, scanning systems for vulnerabilities, patching, enforcing policy, and a litany of other things to keep on top of. It’s a lot to do.
While you’re hunkered down making sure all the internal security is addressed, what’s happening external to your organization could very well be a big blind spot.
With the external side of things, you want to assess and address any security gaps as you would internally. This might come in the form of seeing if you have proper DNS records, what the health of your website(s) look like, and what information exists publicly, good or bad, about your organization that is out of your control.
Failure to address external findings could lead to data breaches, a hit to your reputation, law suits, and fines/penalties. All of these things hurt your organization financially.
This is why conducting regular external cyber risk and threat assessments matter.
What Our Assessments Cover
Publicly Facing Internet: We’ll look at your assets, such as your website, to identify security gaps and vulnerabilities. This is not a pentest. We use passive and active reconnaissance tools and methods to find security holes. We then expand the scope of our search to look on the Internet-at-large for data and information that can negatively impact the security of your company. We’ll also look for misuse/abuse of your intellectual property and anything that can harm your reputation.
Social Media: We’ll look at the social media platforms you use to see if there’s content that you, or your team, published that could lead to the compromise of your organization or harm to reputation. We then branch out to see what others share about your business on different social media platforms that you’ll need to know to protect it.
Insights: Whether we’re searching the surface net, the deep web, or the dark web, we’re looking for chatter of people targeting your organization, stolen login credentials, threats, and stolen intellectual property. These insights will help you strategize what security controls you need to protect your assets, what plans and procedures you need, and how to address the public of an incident. Our insights might also allow you some legal recourse based on certain findings.
How We Deliver Actionable Insights
Once our research concludes and the reporting is finalized, we provide you a comprehensive deliverable.
The report includes:
- Findings.
- Severity ranking of each finding.
- Why the finding is considered a risk or threat.
- Ways you can mitigate the findings.
Why Choose Bsquared Intel’s External Cyber Risk/Threat Assessments?
We have over a decade of experience across various industries.
We leverage tried and true methods and tools to assist in our assessments. With OSINT/SOCMINT being our core competency, we’re able to deliver unique insights.
We custom tailor our assessments to help you reach your security goals. Whether you leverage our main services or you have a unique issue you’re looking to address, we are highly customizable to meet your needs.
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