Working as a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has never been easy or glamorous. But with the recent adoption of new rules by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission on cybersecurity risk management, strategy, governance and incident disclosure, life as a CISO has just gotten harder. Adding to the longstanding organizational risk CISO’s have always managed, now they have to contend with personal risk as well.

Since our beginning, CyCognito has integrated AI techniques to power robust and accurate attack surface discovery and testing. And we’re also adding new capabilities all the time. In this post, we’ll share with you some of the tasks that CyCognito’s AI helps power or simplify, along with a primer of the various techniques we leverage.

While Palo Alto Networks has not released patches for all affected versions, CyCognito has conducted active tests across all customer realms and 97.5% of CyCognito customers’ affected devices are no longer exploitable.

There is an important concept that runs through our product that I call explainability. I use the term a lot with our product and engineering teams to emphasize our data-first approach and our will to stand behind our data. The term is, well, self-explanatory, but I want to dig into it and show how it helps security professionals. To me, I don’t know any other way of building a product that customers will truly trust other than to explain how conclusions and rankings were determined.

“Our report reflects CyCognito’s innovative approach to asset discovery and vulnerability assessment taken, while maintaining a solid foundation in the mature platform space. This placement indicates not only a commitment to advanced ASM solutions but also a keen focus on evolving and adapting to the changing digital landscape rapidly.”

Bugcrowd offers crowdsourced security testing through a community of white hat hackers. CyCognito offers automated discovery of an organization’s externally exposed attack surface. Combined, the two solutions allow for a comprehensive inventory of exposed assets to be included in the scope of bug bounties or pentests.

When Benjamin Bachmann became the Vice President of Group Information Security at Ströer, two years ago, he encountered a significant challenge: the company lacked a comprehensive understanding of its external-facing assets. Ströer is a leading German media conglomerate with diverse operations spanning over 100 subsidiaries, each managing its own IT department, complicating the task of managing cybersecurity across such a diversified portfolio.

While tech sector media coverage on cybersecurity has primarily focused in recent years on trends such as ransomware attacks, vulnerabilities in the DevOps chain, and the growing role of AI in combating threats, a quiet but significant development has been advancing under the radar on several fronts: we refer to the more assertive stance taken by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to elevate security best practices in government and the private sector.

Every organization must prioritize the security of its systems and the protection of its customers’ sensitive information, but exposure doesn’t only happen through applications your own team develops and controls. Incidents like the recent exposure of customer data by Juniper Networks serve as stark reminders of the challenges and risks associated with managing the exposure of software, hardware, and services that you use.