By Sushma Raja
Finding, tracking, and managing all the assets found within an organization’s vast – and often unknown – digital attack surface can be a daunting task. A lack of knowing and monitoring all your assets, including shadow IT, leads to security gaps that can be exploited by attackers.
Understanding and documenting your entire attack surface with relevant asset tracking is critical to securing your environment. This highlights the importance of adding an external attack surface management (EASM) tool to your security stack.
EASM solutions are designed to provide a view of your digital attack surface from the outside in, enabling organizations to see exactly what attackers browsing the internet see when they come across an asset owned by your organization. Microsoft Defender EASM discovers and maps both known and unknown assets from an external perspective just as an attacker would see as they look to find a way to compromise an organization.
Enhanced Defender EASM functionality in Microsoft Copilot for Security
In November 2023, we announced new Defender EASM capabilities in Microsoft Copilot for Security that help security teams understand their attack surface, the pervasive CVEs within it, and get assistance remediation prioritization with the help of generative AI. The attack surface snapshot that Copilot users receive when using the prompts are, by default, generated from a library of pre-built attack surfaces that Microsoft has discovered for thousands of organizations. From our daily scans of the internet, Defender EASM discovers and searches for an organization’s attack surface based on publicly available information.
The results of prompts pulled from an organization’s pre-built attack surface are intended to give customers high-level visibility into their external assets and associated vulnerabilities. So far, they have been used by Early Access customers to achieve this visibility. One customer reported that they were able to identify unknown assets and remediate major vulnerabilities based on information gathered from EASM.
Now, we are thrilled to share enhanced functionality with these capabilities, which allows customers to directly connect their seeded and curated Defender EASM resource to Copilot for Security. With the curated Defender EASM integration, Copilot users can leverage generative AI to get comprehensive, up-to-date information about their external attack surface, analyzing assets that go above and beyond their pre-built attack surface.
Setting up is simple. In the configuration menu of Copilot for Security, turn on the Defender External Attack Surface Management skills on and then click on the Settings icon to enter your resource information. Once this information is entered, your future prompts in Copilot will utilize information from your configured EASM resource.
Read the full post here: Get visibility into your curated external assets with enhanced generative AI capabilities