Unknown and unsecured: The risks of poor asset visibility

In this Help Net Security interview, Juliette Hudson, CTO of CybaVerse, discusses why asset visibility remains a critical cybersecurity challenge. She explains how to maintain security without slowing down operations, shares ways to improve visibility in OT environments, and explains how AI can be both a solution and a challenge.

Hudson also provides actionable advice for security leaders seeking to enhance their organization’s security posture.

Why is asset visibility still such a critical issue?

You can’t protect what you can’t see. If organizations don’t have visibility across all their assets, then they can’t secure their entire estate.

Asset visibility remains a critical issue because organizations often lack a real-time, unified view of their IT, OT, and cloud environments.

Shadow IT, unmanaged endpoints, remote work and third-party integrations create blind spot which increases attack vectors. Without complete visibility, security teams struggle to detect and respond to threats effectively, leaving organizations vulnerable to breaches and compromises.

Good visibility across enterprise assets is no longer just a nice to have, it’s a necessity to survive in the digital world.

How can security teams balance comprehensive visibility with operational efficiency and avoid alert fatigue?

The more devices security teams have on their networks, the more alerts they will receive warning them about potential security issues.

This can exhaust internal teams, meaning they must find a balance where security alerts from huge device inventories don’t over strain them, while also ensuring no alerts are overlooked, which could then escalate into breaches.

It’s a fine balance that organizations must work hard to meet as it means asset security is prioritised without draining internal resources.

To achieve this balance, one of the main things that has become a must, not a nice to have, is automation.

Automation reduces response times and minimises analyst burnout by taking away the menial tasks. If you add AI into this, then AI can help filter noise, reducing false positives and highlighting genuine threats.

This should then allow security teams to focus on high-risk assets and events.

How can organizations improve visibility in OT environments where legacy and industrial control systems are common?

Improving visibility of digital assets is critical for all organizations, otherwise, blind spots will exist in networks which criminals can exploit.

Organizations must treat every endpoint as a potential entry point, ensuring it is seen and secured.

It’s also important to remember that perfect technology doesn’t exist, vulnerabilities will always surface in products, so organizations must not only have an inventory of their assets, but also the ability to apply patches and security updates automatically, without necessarily having to pull all systems down.

Improving OT visibility requires a specialised approach due to the sensitive nature of legacy and ICS systems. There are a few ways that can be adopted to improve visibility:

• Network based monitoring
• Maintain an updated inventory of all OT assets and enforce network segmentation to limit exposure.
• Implement strong authentication and monitoring for any remote access to OT environments.
• Use industry-specific threat intelligence to detect emerging threats targeting industrial environments.

With the rise of AI-driven cyber threats, do new visibility challenges emerge? How can AI assist in improving asset visibility?

Yes, AI-driven threats introduce new challenges, including sophisticated evasion techniques and AI-powered polymorphic malware that can dynamically modify its code at runtime using OpenAI’s API (such as GPT models) which makes it particularly dangerous, as traditional security tools that rely on static signatures struggle to detect it.

This makes asset visibility even more crucial. You should defend against AI using AI.

• AI can identify deviations from normal activity, even for previously unknown threats.
• AI-powered tools can continuously scan networks to detect unmanaged and rogue devices.
• AI can analyse vast amounts of threat data and correlate it with an organization’s asset landscape.
• AI can anticipate potential attack vectors based on observed trends and historical attack data.

What advice would you give security leaders looking to enhance their organization’s visibility and overall cybersecurity posture?

Security leaders should develop a unified asset management strategy that ensures continuous tracking and monitoring of IT, OT, and cloud assets while leveraging automation and AI to enhance efficiency and accuracy.

Adopting a zero trust approach, where devices and users are continuously verified, strengthens security posture.

Collaboration between IT, security and operations teams is essential to improving visibility and risk mitigation. Continuous security training helps reduce human error-related risks, while regular testing, through assessments, penetration tests and red teaming, identifies blind spots.

By integrating these practices, organizations can proactively enhance visibility and strengthen their overall cybersecurity posture.