Whether you’re the CISO or part of the incident response team, it’s likely you have heard of exposure management (EM). Introduced by Gartner in 2022 as the evolution of vulnerability management (VM), the name “exposure management” was adopted by vendors faster than you can say “next gen” or “AI-powered”. Unfortunately for consumers the hype added more confusion than clarity. This blog is a chance to reset expectations.

With EASM now a critical piece of security operations, it seems like every vendor is jumping into the EASM pool. But not all EASM products are created equal. Companies in adjacent markets, like threat intelligence, are creating attack surface scanning products that are well short of enterprise grade. The shortcomings of these basic EASM products can waste time, erode confidence in security teams, and give an inaccurate picture of organizational risk.

CVE-2024-7594 is a severe unrestricted authentication issue affecting HashiCorp’s Vault’s SSH secrets engine. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has not yet evaluated this vulnerability’s CVSS score but HashiCorp assigned it a base score of 7.5 (high). An outside security researcher, Jörn Heissler, discovered an issue with the valid_principals field in Vault’s SSH secrets engine.

When it comes to security, organizations often consider themselves well-covered. But in today’s landscape, where cybersecurity threats evolve at breakneck speed, even the most well-prepared teams cannot afford to have testing gaps. The reality is that if your primary strategy for removing security testing gaps is tightening scanning policies or expanding penetration test scope, you are trying to patch a dam with bubble gum. Is your attack surface covered?

CVE-2024-28987 is a critical (CVSS v3 score: 9.1) hardcoded credential vulnerability in the SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) software. If exploited, this Java deserialization remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability allows attackers remote unauthenticated access to create, read, update and delete data on specific WHD endpoints.

CVE-2024-6670 is a critical (CVSS v3 score: 9.8) SQL injection vulnerability. Threat researcher Sina Kheirkhah (@SinSinology) of Summoning Team (@SummoningTeam) discovered that, if the application is configured with only one user, unauthenticated attackers can leverage this vulnerability to retrieve users’ encrypted passwords.

We just published our 2024 State of External Exposure Management Report. In this report, we looked at where serious issues hide on the average attack surface, how basic protections can help (or fail to) protect critical assets, and the ways that deprioritizing issues can help security teams spend their time on the right vulnerabilities.

Gaps in your security testing program are likely more than simply missed assets. Infrequent testing and even low test accuracy are also gaps, and can be just as bad or worse. Gaps happen despite the best efforts of everyone involved. The good news is that, with some strategic adjustments, you can reduce gaps using tools you likely already have deployed.

CVE-2024-40766 is a critical (CVSS v3 score: 9.3) access control flaw. Its primary danger comes from the potential for providing unauthorized network access, both allowing attackers unfettered access to critical resources and, in some cases, giving attackers the ability to crash the firewall.