WhiteHat Security deploys Attack Surface Management (Image Credit: Tumisu from Pixabay)WhiteHat Security has rolled out Attack Surface Management powered by Bit Discovery. The feature is part of a partnership between WhiteHat and Bit Discovery. It gives IT security teams access to the Bit Discovery database. It also allows enterprises a set of new features to discover, manage and secure their attack surface.

Craig Hinkley, chief executive officer at WhiteHat Security (Image Credit: LinkedIn)
Craig Hinkley, chief executive officer at WhiteHat Security

Craig Hinkley, chief executive officer at WhiteHat Security, said: “Even before the pandemic accelerated enterprise business’ adoption of applications and APIs, security teams have struggled to accurately account for their organization’s entire attack surface of exposed assets.

“Attack Surface Management Powered by Bit Discovery not only bolsters WhiteHat’s platform with innovative tools that provide a tremendous amount of value for our clients, it also advances our vision to build security into each step of the entire software development lifecycle.”

What is attack surface management?

It’s a continuous asset management sweep of the entire technology surface inside an enterprise. ASM is about more than just traditional IT assets that should already be part of an asset management solution. It also includes OT solutions, IoT and threat data, including phishing sites and command and control (C2) servers.

WhiteHat is taking advantage of the Bit Discovery database of assets. The database has more than 5 billion entries. These are a mix of Internet-connected assets and hundreds of third-party resources. Among the items contained in the database are:

  • websites
  • VPNs
  • DNS servers
  • IoT devices
  • phishing sites

There is also an API that allows security teams to access the database and scan for any assets related to an enterprise. For highly distributed enterprises and those with a large OT/IoT environment, this will help discover unknown assets. It also helps close a major security gap between the OT and IT environments.

What’s in Attack Surface Management by Bit Discovery?

In the announcement, WhiteHat called out three key benefits:

  • Complete Attack Surface Visibility— Bit Discovery continuously scans billions of Internet-connected assets to monitor new domains, phishing sites and connected devices to provide an accurate inventory of an organization’s attack surface
  • Simplified Security at Scale— View your complete asset inventory in an executive-friendly, configurable dashboard that prioritizes the most critical open vulnerabilities and allows users to sort data using custom filters
  • Industry-Leading Accuracy— All vulnerabilities are verified by WhiteHat’s Threat Research Center, an elite team of the company’s top security experts, to virtually eliminate false positives

Enterprise Times: What does this mean?

For all the money and time invested by big enterprises in security, only a very few, if any, can truly claim to know what their attack surface is. For most, it simply means those assets that the IT department has recorded.

What this partnership does is provide a new look at what assets IT security teams should be managing. Attacks against IoT have surged in the past few years. In 2019, Nokia reported that IoT devices had the second-highest rate of infection with malware at 32.72%. Many of those devices will not have been under the control of IT departments.

It will be interesting to see how quickly this new capability is taken up by customers of WhiteHat Security and its parent company NTT Ltd. It should be an automatic add for any security team, but many may find the volume of data it suddenly throws up is overwhelming.

Another consideration is will NTT Ltd look to acquire Bit Discovery and perhaps roll it into WhiteHat Security? Its founder, Jeremiah Grossman, was also the founder of WhiteHat Security, which will have helped the partnership negotiations.

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