The external attack surface management identified unexpected assets, suggesting some exist outside our known inventory. While these may not be directly managed by us, the process has brought valuable awareness to the fact that our core servers are externally hosted, prompting a review of similar situations. An external attack surface management scan revealed several outsourced name services, along with one unexpected third-party-linked IP. It's unclear if this was due to past consulting work or a registration error, but since it wasn't relevant to our company, it was easily excluded from future scans. The benefits of Qualys CyberSecurity Asset Management are immediate. We already had the cloud agents installed. They were already on all the servers and workstations. Once we upgraded from the VMDR included GAV (Global AssetView) to CSAM, it was no time before I could see the end-of-life, end-of-service software, and hardware. In addition to vulnerabilities, CSAM provides a better view of other risk factors, but VMDR is very powerful. VMDR was already seeing our limitations in hardening our vulnerabilities. CSAM enhanced our view by adding more visibility and insight into what we have. TruRisk scoring goes beyond traditional vulnerability scoring like CVSS to prioritize both vulnerabilities and assets based on real-world exploitability and industry targeting. This provides a clearer picture of our actual risk by considering factors like published exploits and what attackers are currently focusing on, allowing us to quickly identify critical issues and avoid wasting time on vulnerabilities with a high theoretical risk but low real-world threat. Qualys Cloud Agents can now be configured as passive sensors to discover all devices on our network in real-time, eliminating the requirement for separate virtual or physical passive sensor appliances. These cloud agent sensors monitor network broadcasts instead of egress traffic, and they can even designate a secondary sensor to take over if the primary becomes unavailable, ensuring continuous asset discovery and populating our CSAM platform with managed and unmanaged devices.
