Beyond Daily Scanning: Staying Ahead with Proactive Security Strategies

Technological advancements and the widespread adoption of cloud computing have transformed how organizations operate. With the need for agility and speed, businesses have increasingly turned to cloud environments to streamline their development processes and scale operations. The cloud has enabled faster innovation cycles, offering flexible resources and real-time collaboration. This shift has made continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) practices essential, allowing development teams to push out updates and new features multiple times daily, enhancing business responsiveness and customer satisfaction.

However, with this rapid pace of development comes increased risk. While effective in accelerating workflows, cloud environments and CI/CD pipelines can also introduce security vulnerabilities if not managed correctly. The constant updates and changes, as well as the sheer volume of deployments, can lead to misconfigurations or overlooked security flaws.

If these vulnerabilities aren’t caught early, they leave businesses exposed to potential attacks. Legacy security techniques are reactionary and ill-equipped to handle the new paradigms of development.

Daily Scanning is Slow?

Traditional security approaches have long relied on scheduled scans, often conducted daily or weekly for critical targets, and monthly or critical for less critical systems. Daily scans have become the standard for many security products under the assumption that there would be  ample buffer time between the discovery of a vulnerability and its exploitation by attackers. However, the fast pace of today’s cyber threat landscape has rendered this assumption obsolete, creating critical security gaps for organizations that continue to rely on daily scanning.

A key concept to understand here is the “window of exposure” — the period between when a vulnerability is introduced and when it is detected and remedied. During this time, attackers can discover and exploit the vulnerability, potentially leading to breaches. With daily scans, this window remains open far longer than necessary, leaving systems exposed for hours, or even an entire day, before the following scheduled scan detects the issue.

Even though daily scanning might seem like a reasonable compromise, it’s still too slow in today’s rapidly changing attack surfaces. An entire 24-hour window is significant enough to give attackers a head start, especially when brand new CVE’s can become weaponized exploits in a matter of hours. 

Posture Rapidly Changes

Development cycles were predictable in the past, often spanning weeks or even months. Security strategies were designed to accommodate these slower timelines, with periodic checks aligned with longer development schedules. However, modern development practices have completely transformed this model. Today, rapid iteration and multiple daily deployments have become the norm, driven by the rise of DevOps and cloud computing. This shift necessitates far quicker security responses. Additionally, the complexity of modern systems has dramatically increased, with integrated cloud services and microservices architectures introducing a web of interdependencies that are much harder to secure. This complexity requires a more agile and responsive security approach to ensure vulnerabilities don’t slip through the cracks.

With continuous integration and deployment practices now standard, the frequency of system changes has risen sharply, and with each change, the potential for new vulnerabilities is introduced. Static, periodic security assessments are no longer sufficient to keep up with this rapid pace.

Instead, security strategies must evolve toward continuous monitoring and real-time assessments, ensuring that vulnerabilities are identified and addressed as soon as they appear. This approach minimizes the “window of exposure” and helps maintain a more robust security posture.

Ephemeral Vulnerabilities

Some vulnerabilities appear and disappear under specific conditions. These temporary security weaknesses present detection challenges that even the best traditional scanners often miss (due to the daily frequency). Often, these scenarios can happen with cloud infrastructure during auto-scaling events, permissions management, or more. Scheduled daily scanning would need to chance upon these vulnerabilities during their lifespan.

Attackers Move Fast

Motivated and opportunistic attackers relentlessly pursue new vulnerabilities, even in previously considered secure technologies. Continuous exploit development is a key tactic used by cybercriminals. They actively dissect and reverse-engineer popular software to uncover hidden flaws, constantly staying ahead of the curve by developing exploits for widely used systems. Even previously deemed “safe” technologies can become vulnerable as attackers find new ways to exploit their weaknesses. Even when a vendor discovers their weakness, there is still a significant lag time of when attackers have known about a vulnerability versus when the vendor discloses that they have patched the vulnerability in their own software. This persistent threat landscape means that security teams cannot afford to rely on outdated assumptions about safety, as attackers are constantly innovating.

In addition to developing new exploits, attackers constantly scan the internet for exposed infrastructure, looking for any vulnerabilities or misconfigurations to exploit. This relentless probing allows them to identify potential weaknesses, such as open ports, outdated software, or incorrect settings, that can be used as entry points. Configuration errors, in particular, have always presented a prime opportunity for attackers. Often, these mistakes occur due to the complexity of modern security settings or simple oversight. Attackers patiently wait for these lapses, using them to gain a foothold in otherwise well-protected systems.

Closing the Window

The focus must shift from merely reacting to incidents to a more preventive approach. While traditional security response models aim to minimize damage after an attack, their reactive nature still leaves room for compromise. The real challenge lies in preventing breaches before they happen, protecting valuable data, and maintaining uninterrupted operations.

To achieve this, security strategies need to evolve, adopting a more proactive stance driven by continuous monitoring, early detection, and a mindset shift toward anticipation.

Shift to Proactive Security

Traditional security models focus on detecting and responding to attacks after it occurs. While rapid response reduces damage, it still has some impact, be it disclosed data or operational disruption. Shifting from reactive to proactive security aims to prevent damage from ever occurring.

This shift is made possible by advancements in security technologies, such as early detection systems that continuously monitor for potential exposures. These technologies enable organizations to identify vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. They use techniques to analyze and identify high-signal vulnerabilities, ensuring that security teams can respond to actual exploitable issues rather than wasting time on false positives.

Beyond the technological improvements, there has also been a significant cultural shift within organizations toward adopting proactive security strategies. Instead of relying solely on reacting to incidents, businesses focus on anticipating threats and taking preventive measures. This shift in mindset enhances security and proves to be more cost-effective in the long run, reducing the likelihood of expensive breaches and minimizing financial losses, reputational damage, and the operational downtime associated with security incidents.

Always Watching

Continuous security monitoring helps close the window of opportunity for attackers looking for new vulnerabilities to exploit. By implementing ongoing monitoring, organizations can protect against known threats while swiftly identifying and addressing new vulnerabilities. The ability to detect threats as they occur allows security teams to respond in real time, mitigating potential damage before it escalates into a more serious breach. Just as attackers work tirelessly to discover weaknesses, continuous monitoring ensures that security measures keep pace.

Staying Ahead

With attackers relentlessly probing for weaknesses, waiting 24 hours between scans leaves your organization vulnerable to exploitation and catastrophic damage. Assetnote helps close this gap in two ways. 

First, Assetnote’s continuous attack surface monitoring scans current and new assets hourly and  detects vulnerabilities as they emerge, rather than the following day. These real-time exposure discoveries  in your attack surface are also verified and provable as Assetnote’s platform will provide an exact proof of concept so a security analyst can easily replicate the finding for themselves. By providing the method to replicate, security teams do not need to waste precious time in checking if the finding is a false positive in the first place.

Second, Assetnote’s own security research and “exploit” development team leads the industry in actively identifying exploitable vulnerabilities in popular third-party software our customers rely on. Upon disclosure to the vendor, corresponding vulnerability checks are added to the platform so customers are notified much earlier. Often, Assetnote customers have already mitigated or remediate their systems’ vulnerabilities long before the vendors have released their own writeup.

Proactive exposure management is how organizations can close the 24-hour window and maintain a more secure and resilient posture against cyber threats.