Security professionals today constantly need to appease the growing number of digital assets on a network: cloud platforms, containers, web applications, IoT devices, operational technologies, and the list goes on. The more assets one has, the more opportunities for malicious actors to break defenses and get access to sensitive data.

The modern attack surface is constantly evolving and growing. Just how much of an organization's assets are exposed determines how many vulnerable entry points it has for attackers trying to infiltrate their systems. This means that reducing cyber exposure is crucial in reducing the cyber risks your organization is facing.

What constitutes a cyber exposure?

We talked about what an "exposure" is in cybersecurity when we were discussing the topic of CVEs, but let's reiterate. An exposure is considered an error or misconfiguration that provides attackers indirect access to a system or a network, often leading to a data breach. But, when talking about cyber exposure in general, the definition might be wider, and goes beyond purely technical misconfiguration.

**Cyber exposure** is considered to be the worst case scenario in the event of an organization suffering a cyber attack, and the probability of the attack occurring. It's a discipline of managing and measuring risk associated with sensitive assets and data being compromised.

Here are three examples of what is considered an exposure that greatly increases the risk of unauthorized access:

**BYOB**: The more devices that don't have security controls accessing the organization's network, the bigger the attack surface.

**Supply chain**: Being part of a supply chain greatly increases your exposure as there are now more players in the game, and more networks and systems with security measures you have no knowledge of.

**Data and security policies** not being continuously reviewed.

Cyber exposure provides a framework with which organizations can have a better grasp over their assets and risks across all levels. Larger organizations have a larger network of digital assets, meaning that the attack surface and cyber exposure are much greater. With millions of digital assets there are challenges with the lack of visibility of those assets, and you can't protect what you can't see. But it isn't enough to know only what assets belong to the organization such limited knowledge would leave security teams without enough context for their detection, protection and remediation efforts. This leads us to prioritization, which is one of the pillars of any discipline handling risk.

Cyber exposure is not the same as a vulnerability. It actually depends on the exploitability of that vulnerability and the consequences measured in financial, reputational and operational losses that would follow. It's important to understand which vulnerability is being currently exploited by hackers, which vulnerability poses the greatest risk to your critical assets, and what would be the damage done if that vulnerability is exploited. In this way, you can understand which exposure is the most important.

A breach on assets that don't contain any critical financial, customer or intellectual data is not the same as cyber exposure, and shouldn't be treated as one that would involve any piece of that critical data.

What you don't know, will hurt you: The cyber exposure gap

While talking about cyber exposure, there is one term we should go over to aid in understanding the entire concept of exposure. As we mentioned above, one of the biggest challenges regarding cyber exposure is the lack of visibility. The cyber exposure gap represents the lack of visibility between what your security tools are showing you and critical areas of your attack surface, such as any vulnerability or misconfiguration not shown by currently used tools.

To reiterate you can't protect what you can't see. And the solution here isn't as simple as merely getting a single security tool that wil...