Risk exposure management

What is exposure management?

Exposure management is a proactive cybersecurity strategy focused on identifying and addressing security gaps before attackers exploit them. Unlike traditional risk assessments that happen periodically, exposure management involves continuous visibility into vulnerabilities across your identity and access infrastructure.

In the context of identity and access management, exposure management means constantly analyzing user privileges, group memberships, and object permissions in systems like Active Directory (AD) to detect and eliminate potential threats before they’re weaponized. By focusing on risk exposure management, organizations can understand how internal weaknesses, such as excessive admin rights or nested group memberships, can be leveraged in an attack path and how to take corrective action swiftly.

Understanding risk exposure management

Given its widespread use in managing identities and access, AD is frequently targeted by cybercriminals looking to take control over organizational networks. Misconfigured permissions, dormant accounts, and excessive privileges in AD silently increase your organization’s risk exposure, and when left unchecked, they create pathways for attackers to move laterally, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate data.

To stay ahead of threats, enterprises need more than reactive security. They need a risk exposure management solution that continuously identifies, assesses, and helps reduce risks in AD environments. ADManager Plus, an IGA solution with risk assessment, access certification, and compliance reporting capabilities, helps enterprises visualize potential AD attack paths and take proactive actions to mitigate potential security vulnerabilities.

Risk exposure management in ADManager Plus

ADManager Plus constantly analyzes AD to detect and eliminate potential threats before they’re weaponized. By focusing on risk exposure management in ADManager Plus, organizations can understand how a member of a privileged AD group can be leveraged in an attack path and how they can take corrective action swiftly. Rather than providing a list of group members, ADManager Plus maps out how members and groups could be exploited in real-world attack scenarios.

Key components of risk exposure management

• Attack paths: Visualize how an attacker can traverse through group memberships and delegation chains.
• Privileged entities: AD groups that possess elevated permissions, whether through direct or nested relationships, are called privileged entities here. These aren’t limited to default admin groups; you can add any group and analyze its risk exposure.
• A query library: Use predefined queries to identify security risks, exposures, and attack paths.
• Exposure links: Understand how objects are interconnected and how each node can increase a group's risk exposure.
• Remediation measures: Get actionable suggestions to proactively safeguard exposed targets.

How ADManager Plus helps manage risk exposure in AD

By leveraging ADManager Plus' risk exposure management features, organizations can:

• Gain a centralized view of exposure trends across AD domains.
• Gain visibility into the permission inheritance of group members.
• Visualize how privileged groups could be used in multistep attacks.
• Prioritize remediation efforts based on actual risk.
• Correlate group memberships to detect risky privilege chains.

Use cases

Use case 1: Understanding group permission inheritance

Often, users gain unintended powerful access through complex group memberships and inherited permissions. ADManager Plus allows you to trace the full chain of memberships and understand the permissions the members have inherited, making it easy to identify and rectify hidden privilege escalation routes.

Use case 2: Assessing your security posture during AD migrations

Before, during, and after an AD group migration, ensure that no new vulnerabilities are introduced and that your security posture remains robust. This helps you prevent security gaps that often arise during complex system changes.

Navigate compliance requirements with risk exposure management

Meet the following compliance requirements with the risk exposure management features in ADManager Plus:

Key benefits of risk exposure management in ADManager Plus