Research Finds 97 Percent of Security Findings Tied To Cloud Assets, Expanding Attack Surface Threats Puts Organizations At Risk
The 2022 State of Cyber Assets Report (2022 SCAR) conducted by JupiterOne, the industry’s leading cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) platform provider, analyzed more than 370 million assets at nearly 1,300 organizations. It reveals the current state of enterprise cyber assets – cloud workloads, devices, networks, apps, data, and users.
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The top findings include:
The enterprise technology ecosystem is being rapidly reshaped by API-first, cloud-first, and digital transformation initiatives, but they come at a high cost to security. As more assets are deployed into enterprise production environments, companies face an increased risk of a cyber attack that starts by exploiting unknown, unmanaged, or poorly managed internet-facing assets. The modern attack surface has grown too large and complex for security professionals to manage using traditional, manual approaches to the asset lifecycle.
Security teams are fatigued and understaffed. Teams have an unprecedented number of assets to inventory, manage, and secure across a cloud-based organization. The report found that, on average, modern security teams are responsible for more than 165,000 cyber assets, including cloud workloads, devices, network assets, applications, data assets, and users. With cybersecurity talent in short supply, organizations need to help their existing teams become more efficient.
Cloud deployments are taking over as the de facto deployment model in companies of all shapes and sizes, leading to 97 percent of security findings coming from cloud assets. Nearly 90 percent of device assets in the modern organization are cloud-based, meaning physical devices such as laptops, tablets, smartphones, routers, and IoT hardware represent less than 10 percent of total devices. Cloud network assets outnumber physical networks by a ratio of nearly 60:1, yet analysis of nearly 10 million security policies found that cloud-specific ones represent less than 30 percent of the total.
Most security teams pay little attention to the indirect relationships between users, devices, networks, and critical data. Just 8 percent of queries asked the JupiterOne platform to consider second-degree or third-degree relationships between assets. Data, including critical data and sensitive information , is among the most-related types of assets, with 105 million first-degree relationships (i.e. direct access from) to users, apps, devices, and workloads. The analysis also uncovered nearly 45 million relationships between security findings, indicating that many security backlogs contain findings identified as critical vulnerabilities or policy exceptions.
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This leads to the average security team being blind to some security risks, and many are under-resourced or under-skilled to fully understand the risk of potential compromises. Organizations need to invest in cloud-native security tools that allow for automation and data-driven decision-making, helping security teams gain true visibility of their cyber asset landscape and asset relationships.
- Cyber assets significantly outnumber employees in the enterprise. The average organization has well over 500 cyber assets for every human employee, making automation a requirement for security success.
- Devices are proliferating. Devices, including hosts, agents, and other device-related assets, are still an essential part of cybersecurity. The ratio of devices to every employee at the average organization is 110:1. The average security team is responsible for 32,190 devices. Additionally, nearly 90 percent of modern device inventories are cloud-based.
- Ultra-reliable dynamic network architectures demand new, automated approaches to security. Modern DevOps teams use network interfaces to route traffic between subnets by hosting load balancers, proxy servers, and network address translation (NAT) services. Static IP addresses comprise fewer than 1 percent of network assets, while network interfaces make up 56 percent. The dynamic attack surface demands new, automated approaches to security.
- Modern organizations are highly vulnerable to software supply chain attacks. The analysis of over 20 million application assets found that just 9 percent of applications were homegrown, or developed in-house, while 91 percent of code running in the enterprise was developed by third parties.
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