Dubai-based security firm SpiderSilk puts on an adversarial hat when scanning for Internet-facing threats affecting companies.
The company's scanning technologies require only the company's name, not a customer's list of IP addresses and domains. Within a few hours, the tools scan billions of IP addresses and hunt down leaked data, assets, systems, compromised credentials, and other information the organization never meant to expose to the world. The idea is to mimic an outsider's perspective and use artificial intelligence (AI) to contextualize and discover weak spots that could be targeted tomorrow, says Mossab Hussein, SpiderSilk's co-founder and chief security officer.
SpiderSilk's tools are like an early warning system that helps companies spot risks on the open Internet before hackers exploit them. Based on SpiderSilk's findings, companies can take corrective action or patch systems to fend off threats.
"Organizations were struggling to understand what's exposed on their digital presence. They didn't know what that looks like, or what kind of harm it could cause, until it was too late," Hussein says.
Why CISOs Need to Know Their Exposure
Managing external threats isn't new, but AI provides a unique twist by stitching together more data points to identify external attack surfaces, says Pete Shoard, chief of research for cybersecurity at Gartner. Threats happen at machine speed, and companies are slow to respond, Shoard says. CISOs need to be proactive, not reactive, in approaching cybersecurity.