CyCognito platform enhancements help users identify and protect unmanaged assets

CyCognito announced a major platform expansion of its External Attack Surface Management (EASM).

The latest release includes extended visibility across cloud assets, web application API endpoints and web application firewalls (WAFs), enhanced web crawling capabilities, compliance management controls, integrations for exploit database remediation and more.

Now security teams have greater insight, visibility and guidance to efficiently identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities.

CyCognito’s recent State of External Exposure Management uncovered an alarming number of vulnerable public cloud, mobile and web applications exposing sensitive data. The company revealed that 74% of assets with PII are vulnerable to at least one known major exploit, and that 70% of web applications have severe security gaps, like lacking WAF protection or an encrypted connection like HTTPS. The findings support the critical need for full-scope visibility in order to manage unmanaged risks across their attack surface.

“Undiscovered and unprotected cloud APIs and applications are an open door to your organization’s most critical data, and by far the biggest security threat today,” said Ansh Patnaik, CPO, CyCognito. “Scaling visibility and protection to stay ahead of continued attack surface growth is critical given the rapid proliferation of applications endpoints. This release reflects our commitment to innovation and to helping our customers safeguard against rising threats.”

The new features will extend the power of the CyCognito platform to identify and protect unmanaged assets. Capabilities include:

• Web application API endpoints visibility: Identifies and consolidates significant security-oriented details, such as potential issues and vulnerabilities, from a centralized dashboard.
• Web application firewalls (WAFs) identification: Informs security teams about applications that are at risk because they are not protected by a WAF. The CyCognito platform can identify over 150 WAFs, including popular ones like Akamai, AWS CloudFront, Azure Front Door, Cloudflare, Fastly, Fortinet, and Imperva.
• Improved web app discovery: Enhancements to the CyCognito PROBE (Programmatic Recon and Online Behavior Emulation) discovery engine, which emulates human recon behavior, catalog up to 5x more pages inside web applications than the previous version. As a result, CyCognito customers see 2x more of their web application attack surface and a 5 percent increase in valid issues.
• CyCognito cloud connector: Provides a secure and reliable way to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments. Enhances external attack surface visibility by identifying and classifying cloud assets, actively testing for security risks, and prioritizing the most critical risks for remediation.
• Exploit database expansion: Cycognito integrates with leading exploit databases for advanced issue prioritization capabilities, insight into the current threat state, remediation instructions, and more.
• Top risks diagram: Dashboard that helps security teams present their organization’s top risks that attackers might use against an entity. The solution shows their path of discovery and can be drilled down to show more actionable details.
• Compliance management: Allows governance risk compliance (GRC) and vulnerability management (VM) teams to view the alignment of externally exposed digital assets to six major compliance frameworks.