Discover the Top 5 XDR Use Cases for Today’s Cyber Threat Landscape
Explore how XDR boosts threat detection and incident response with enhanced visibility,
Effective cybersecurity begins with knowing what you’re defending. Organizations investing heavily in security tools often miss something fundamental: a comprehensive understanding of their own environment. This critical gap creates significant risk exposure that sophisticated attackers readily exploit. This article explores cyber terrain mapping; its importance, technical requirements, and how Fidelis Elevate® addresses this essential security challenge.
When adversaries target an enterprise, their first objective is to map the environment. They systematically discover assets, learn each asset’s role, identify operating systems, document communication paths, catalog installed software, and find vulnerabilities. An adversary’s ability to get in, lurk undetected, and study your environment directly impacts how well they can exploit your business.
Meanwhile, many enterprise security teams lack this same comprehensive understanding of their own terrain. According to Fidelis Security documentation: Often, enterprise security teams don’t fully understand the terrain that they’re trying to defend. This is especially true in modern, dynamic, and distributed hybrid-and multi-cloud environments. Instead, they rely on static network drawings and periodic asset inventories.
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework emphasizes that organizations must identify, prioritize, and focus resources on the organization’s high value assets (HVA) that require increased levels of protection, taking measures commensurate with the risk to such assets. Without thorough terrain mapping, this prioritization becomes practically impossible.
Today’s cybersecurity perimeter is no longer static; it changes constantly as new cloud services are added and removed. The security perimeter is now dynamic — changing constantly as new cloud services are added and removed. Typically, cloud assets are controlled by product and project teams throughout the enterprise (otherwise referred to as Shadow IT since they were deployed outside of IT and security controls may not have been consistently applied).
These challenges include:
Static asset inventories cannot keep pace with this level of environmental flux. By the time traditional documentation is completed, the environment has already transformed.
| Security Function | Without Terrain Mapping | With Terrain Mapping |
|---|---|---|
| Threat Detection | Limited visibility into lateral movement between unknown assets | Comprehensive visibility of anomalous connections across all assets |
| Vulnerability Management | Uniform treatment of vulnerabilities regardless of asset value | Risk-based prioritization based on asset criticality and exposure |
| Security Resource Allocation | Distributed security coverage across all systems | Focused protection on high-value assets and probable attack paths |
| Incident Response | Extended investigation timelines due to asset discovery during incidents | Immediate context enabling rapid investigation and containment |
| Shadow IT Governance | Unknown cloud resources operating outside security controls | Complete visibility across all provisioned cloud services |
Don’t let attackers get the upper hand. Take control of your cyber terrain today.
What’s inside:
Based on the documentation from Fidelis Security, effective cyber terrain mapping requires several key technical capabilities:
Security teams need visibility across all assets, including:
As Fidelis emphasizes: You can’t protect what you can’t see. To better safeguard your data and assets, you need to understand what you have, identify points of exposure or vulnerability, and proactively analyze critical areas to prioritize any security weakness.
Manual classification doesn’t scale in dynamic environments. Systems must automatically:
Understanding how systems communicate reveals potential attack paths and segmentation opportunities, including:
Not all assets have equal value or risk exposure. Effective mapping must incorporate:
According to Fidelis: CFO and HR systems are more valuable targets than marketing and email servers, file servers, and application servers are bigger targets than user laptops.
Point-in-time snapshots quickly become obsolete. Terrain mapping must be:
Fidelis Elevate® addresses these challenges through an active XDR (eXtended Detection and Response) platform specifically designed for terrain-based defense. The platform implements multiple complementary techniques:
Fidelis combines several discovery methods to build a complete terrain map:
This approach ensures visibility across all managed and unmanaged assets, on-premises, in clouds, and across endpoints.
Fidelis employs patented Deep Session Inspection technology that provides significantly more content and context than netflow solutions. This capability:
Fidelis automatically classifies assets without requiring manual tagging:
The platform applies sophisticated risk analysis across all discovered assets:
Uniquely, Fidelis Elevate® incorporates deception technology that actively shapes the cyber terrain:
Fidelis identifies shadow IT that likely isn’t properly secured by analyzing all traffic and cloud provisioning activities. This capability reveals systems operating outside security controls, allowing organizations to bring them under appropriate governance.
The platform identifies unmanaged assets on your networks (e.g., BYOD and IoT devices) to fortify and defend assets without endpoint protection and/or where it’s not always possible or feasible to install EPP/EDR agents. This addresses a significant blind spot in many security programs.
Fidelis helps define and prioritize your most important assets to improve fortification and protection of the most critical assets. This ensures that limited security resources focus on the organization’s most valuable targets.
The platform provides continuous vulnerability assessment through daily updates to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database and automatic updates when new software is detected. This eliminates gaps between traditional vulnerability scans.
Fidelis creates a deception network based on a terrain map that enables decoys to be automatically installed, moved, and adapted as the terrain changes. This active approach to terrain manipulation increases attacker uncertainty while providing defenders with visibility into attack methods.
Implementing comprehensive cyber terrain mapping with Fidelis Elevate® delivers several tangible benefits:
Organizations gain deep, contextual data that enables advanced cyber terrain mapping across your entire environment. This eliminates blind spots that attackers frequently exploit.
Fidelis detects risks that other tools miss; faster and in less rack space. This speed advantage helps organizations identify and respond to threats before significant damage occurs.
By automatically piece[ing] together weak signals and set[ting] thresholds for alerts, Fidelis helps eliminate alert fatigue with high-fidelity conclusions. This improves SOC efficiency and effectiveness.
Rather than reacting to attacks after they occur, organizations can anticipate, detect and respond to threats faster by shifting security analysts to a more proactive approach.
The platform helps organizations promote cyber resiliency by maintaining business continuity through an active attack and enables them to return impacted systems to normal business operations as quickly as possible.
Understanding cyber terrain is not optional, it’s the essential first step in effective cyber defense. Understanding your Environment is the First Step in Cyber Defense… Understanding is the first step in both offense (adversary) and defense (you).
Organizations lacking comprehensive terrain visibility face significant disadvantages when defending against sophisticated adversaries. Fidelis Elevate®‘s terrain-based approach provides the visibility, context, and automated analysis needed to protect modern enterprise environments. By mapping and continuously assessing the cyber terrain, organizations can shift from reactive to proactive security postures, anticipating and mitigating threats before they cause damage.
As digital transformation initiatives continue expanding attack surfaces and adversaries grow increasingly sophisticated, thoroughly understanding and defending your cyber terrain will remain a defining characteristic of resilient organizations.
See Fidelis in action. Learn how our fast and scalable platforms provide full visibility, deep insights, and rapid response to help security teams across the World protect, detect, respond, and neutralize advanced cyber adversaries.