In 2013, Yahoo suffered one of the worst data breaches known to this day. Over three billion user accounts were exposed in the incident — including sensitive information such as passwords and security questions.
Today, a lot has changed.
We have stricter privacy laws and new security tools to prevent compromised data.
Regardless, new data breaches are headlining the news every day, and users are tired of hearing that their information has been compromised during hacking.
The problem is — the data that gets stolen in breaches doesn’t harm only the victimized company and its users. One hack leads to another, creating a domino effect for individuals and other businesses.
How does one company’s data breach compromise the future of another?
What role does external attack surface management have in the discovery of exposed information and in protecting businesses from future attacks?
The Danger of Leaked Employee Data Following a Breach
Once a company suffers a data breach, it can lead to the theft of information. Bad actors can use the stolen data either to demand ransom (in exchange for not sharing sensitive user data) or sell the data to other criminals.
The consequences depend on the attack and what kind of data was exposed during it. The worst-case scenario of a data breach is a hacker releasing the stolen information to the public.
Data leaked on the dark web sold on hacking forums, or left in data dumps is like a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. It could be hours, days or months until a criminal uses it to breach another company or harm users whose data has been leaked.
An employee could unknowingly be using their leaked password for both personal and business accounts. With their credentials exposed on a hacking forum or a data dump, threat actors could have access to both.
As a result, the credentials can enable criminals to:
- Get into the system of another company.
- Perform a successful phishing campaign (since they have more data).
- Steal the identity of an unsuspecting individual.
- Extort businesses and users.
Identity theft is possible if the sensitive data that has been leaked or sold includes information such as social security numbers, birthdays, addresses, credit card numbers, and names.
After the Optus breach in 2022, one Melbourne family lost $40,000 following the identity theft. The hacker used the data stolen in the breach to withdraw money from their bank account.
Preventing Hacking With External Attack Surface Management
In cybersecurity, the attack surface refers to anything that a cybercriminal could exploit for online criminal activity – entry points such as poorly protected websites and flaws in the cloud. Over the years, the attack surface expands.
To keep up, security teams now also have to consider external attack surfaces — internet-facing assets such as leaked passwords.
With more cyberattacks occurring than ever before and complex infrastructures such as multi-cloud environments that have to be properly set and regularly managed, securing business and preventing data breaches is bound to become even more challenging than it is.
To keep up, companies use external attack surface management – the security solution made for the discovery of vulnerabilities. It does so by repeating the process of scanning for information, conducting an analysis and mitigating the threat.
Automated and running in the background 24/7, it reports the latest findings on a dashboard for the security team to see. When it does, it also analyzes the data and lets teams know which weaknesses are high risk — or which flaws need to be patched before others.
Let’s say a bad actor releases sensitive user or client data on a hacking forum. The external attack surface management can warn teams and force users to change their passwords if they’ve been leaked in a data breach.
Additional Capabilities of External Attack Surface Management
Ultimately, external attack surface management is more than a tool for identifying rouge data in hacking forums.
The tool also:
- Uncovers a trail of the digital footprint of a business (anything shared by the company or about the company online).
- Finds vulnerabilities such as errors in the configuration of the cloud (AKA cloud misconfigurations).
- Discovers the use of shadow IT within the organization (such as devices security teams aren’t aware are being used by employees for work).
Even more, it’s linked to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework knowledge base. With that, the external attack surface management is updated with new hacking techniques and tactics that bad actors used in real-life attacks in the past.
Protecting the Future of the Company With Cyber Hygiene
When it comes to cybersecurity, here are some of the things that we know for sure:
- The attack surfaces of businesses continue to grow — creating even more blind spots for teams.
- A data breach of one company could lead to the data breach of another company or stolen identities.
- Hackers will continue using exposed data to conduct further attacks and target individual users.
- Security has to be updated at all times to keep up with the ever-shifting and ever-growing attack surface.
It’s important to uncover weaknesses such as leaked data or incorrectly configured cloud to repair such mistakes – patch up security and alter passwords before the hackers connect the dots and use them to damage your business.
The most security teams can do in such hectic times is to identify flaws and retain visibility of the attack surface with automated tools.
Regular management of security, updating devices, and discovering possible vulnerabilities is essential cybersecurity hygiene that can aid you in preventing hacking activity in the long run.
Data on the loose can turn your company into the next victim of a data breach — catch it with external attacks surface management before hackers get the chance to exploit it.
