Highlights of Our CISO Dinner
Upgrading struggling vulnerability management programs to Threat Exposure Management, with Host, CISO Al Lindseth formerly from Plains All American Pipeline and PWC - 6 minute podcast
The old “castle-and-moat” approach to security is a thing of the past. Your organization’s perimeter is no longer a single, defensible line; it’s a distributed and porous collection of remote employees, cloud services, and third-party vendors. Every connection is a potential entry point, and your attack surface is larger and more complex than ever before. Gaining visibility across this fragmented environment is one of the biggest challenges for modern security teams. It forces us to answer a fundamental question: across this vast digital footprint, what should be continuously monitored to detect potential security threats? We’ll break down the key areas you can’t afford to ignore, from your internal network to your software supply chain.
Think of continuous cybersecurity monitoring as your organization’s 24/7 security watchtower. Instead of performing occasional security checks, like quarterly vulnerability scans or annual penetration tests, this approach involves an ongoing, automated process of scanning your entire digital environment. It’s designed to constantly look for weak spots, misconfigurations, and emerging threats in real time. This isn’t about getting a snapshot of your security posture; it’s about having a live video feed.
The core idea is to move beyond a static, point-in-time defense. Your network, applications, and user activities are always changing, and so are the tactics of attackers. Continuous monitoring gives you the persistent visibility needed to keep up. By automatically gathering and analyzing data from across your total attack surface, you can identify potential issues the moment they appear, not weeks or months later during a scheduled audit. This constant vigilance is the foundation for building a security program that is both resilient and responsive to the modern threat landscape. It provides the raw intelligence your team needs to make faster, more informed decisions and stay ahead of potential attackers.
In cybersecurity, what you don’t know can absolutely hurt you. The primary goal of constant monitoring is to find and fix security problems before they can be exploited. Without a real-time view of what’s happening across your IT systems, you’re essentially flying blind. A threat that emerges the day after a manual scan could go undetected for months, giving attackers a wide-open window to establish a foothold.
Constant monitoring closes that gap. It provides a clear, up-to-the-minute picture of your security posture, helping you understand your actual risk at any given moment. This visibility is crucial for effective vulnerability and threat prioritization, allowing your team to focus on the most critical threats instead of getting lost in a sea of low-risk alerts. It’s not just about finding threats; it’s about understanding your environment so you can prevent them in the first place.
For too long, many security teams have been stuck in a reactive cycle: an alarm goes off, and everyone scrambles to put out the fire. Continuous monitoring helps you break that cycle and shift to a proactive stance. Instead of waiting for an attack to happen, you can actively hunt for early warning signs, like a series of failed login attempts or unusual data access patterns, and intervene before a breach occurs.
This proactive approach transforms security from a defensive game to an offensive one. When your monitoring system detects a potential threat, you can take immediate, automated action—like isolating a compromised endpoint or blocking a suspicious IP address. A platform like Uni5 Xposure provides the unified view and intelligence needed to make this shift. It’s about moving from asking “What happened?” to “What could happen, and how do we stop it?”
Think of your network as the central nervous system of your organization. It’s the pathway for every piece of data, every user request, and every application communication. If a threat actor gains a foothold, they will almost certainly use the network to move around, exfiltrate data, or communicate with their command-and-control servers. This makes network monitoring one of the most critical components of any continuous security strategy. By keeping a close eye on what’s happening on your network, you can spot the early warning signs of an attack before it escalates into a full-blown breach.
Effective network monitoring isn’t just about having the right tools; it’s about knowing what to look for. You need to understand what normal looks like so you can quickly identify what’s abnormal. This involves watching the flow of data, scrutinizing the logs from your security devices, and inspecting the destinations your systems are trying to reach. A comprehensive approach to Total Attack Surface Management must include a deep understanding of network activity. Let’s break down the key areas you should be watching.
At its core, network monitoring is about watching how data moves across your network. This means keeping an eye on traffic patterns between servers, workstations, and the internet. You’re looking for anything out of the ordinary—a sudden spike in data being sent to an unknown external address, a server that suddenly starts communicating on a strange port, or internal systems trying to connect to devices they have no business talking to. These anomalies can be the first indicators of malware activity, lateral movement by an attacker, or a misconfigured system. By establishing a baseline of normal network behavior, you can quickly spot deviations that signal a potential threat.
Your firewalls and Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) are your frontline defenders, and their logs are a rich source of security intelligence. These logs provide a detailed record of every connection attempt that was allowed or, more importantly, blocked. Regularly analyzing this data helps you see where network requests are coming from and where they’re trying to go. Are you seeing repeated connection attempts from a specific IP address known for malicious activity? Are your internal systems triggering IDS alerts for trying to communicate with a known malware domain? This information is crucial for understanding the threats targeting your organization and helps with Vulnerability & Threat Prioritization by showing you what attackers are actively trying to exploit.
DNS is often called the phonebook of the internet, and monitoring DNS queries gives you incredible insight into your organization’s activity. Every time a device on your network wants to connect to a website or service, it makes a DNS request. By inspecting these queries, you can see exactly what domains your systems are trying to reach. This is a powerful way to detect malware infections, as compromised machines often try to “phone home” to their command-and-control servers. Similarly, analyzing web traffic can uncover connections to phishing sites or attempts to exfiltrate data through web-based channels. Keeping up with the latest Threat Advisories can help you know which malicious domains to watch out for in your DNS and web logs.
Your security tools and systems are only one piece of the puzzle. The people who use them—your employees, contractors, and partners—are the other. Understanding who is accessing your network, what they’re doing, and when they’re doing it is fundamental to spotting threats. Attackers often rely on compromised credentials to blend in with normal traffic, making user behavior analysis a critical layer of defense. By establishing a baseline for normal activity, you can more easily identify deviations that could signal a compromised account, an insider threat, or simple human error. Focusing on user activity helps you answer the crucial questions needed to protect your environment: Is this access legitimate? Is this behavior expected? Does this action put our data at risk? When you can answer these confidently, you move from a reactive stance to a proactive one, stopping threats before they cause real damage. This isn’t about micromanaging your team; it’s about protecting them and the organization from sophisticated attacks that exploit the human element. A sudden change in a user’s typical pattern is often the earliest indicator of compromise, giving your security team a valuable head start in their investigation and response.
Think of every login as a digital knock on your door. You need to know who’s knocking, where they’re coming from, and if they have the right key. Consistently monitoring user actions is essential for detecting unusual behavior. Establish a baseline for each user: What time do they normally log in? Which devices do they use? What data do they typically access? An employee who suddenly logs in at 3 a.m. from a different continent or tries to access sensitive HR files for the first time should trigger an immediate alert. A comprehensive platform can give you a unified view of cyber risks like these, helping you connect the dots between seemingly isolated events before they escalate into a full-blown incident.
Privileged accounts—like those for system administrators and service accounts—are the keys to your entire kingdom. For an attacker, compromising one of these accounts is the ultimate goal, as it grants them broad access to move laterally, disable security controls, and exfiltrate data. That’s why you must pay extra close attention to their activity. Keep a close watch for any permission changes, new account creations, or modifications to critical system configurations. Any unexpected action from a privileged account should be treated as a high-priority event. Understanding the context behind these activities helps you prioritize potential threats and focus your team’s attention on the accounts that pose the greatest risk to your organization.
With remote and hybrid work as the new standard, your network perimeter is more distributed than ever. Every VPN and remote access connection is a potential entry point for an attacker. It’s not enough to just grant access; you have to monitor it continuously. Look for red flags like logins from suspicious IP addresses, simultaneous sessions from geographically impossible locations, or a sudden spike in failed login attempts against your VPN concentrator. Being proactive means actively hunting for these signs of trouble rather than waiting for an attack to succeed. Properly managing your total attack surface includes keeping a tight rein on these remote connections and ensuring they aren’t creating an easy path for adversaries.
Your systems are not static. They are constantly changing with new software, updates, and configuration tweaks. This dynamic nature means vulnerabilities can pop up at any time, creating openings for attackers. Continuous assessment is about keeping a constant watch on your systems to find and fix these weaknesses before they can be exploited. It’s the difference between patching a small crack in a dam and dealing with a full-blown flood. By focusing on patches, configurations, and your asset inventory, you can maintain a strong, resilient security posture.
Unpatched vulnerabilities are one of the most common ways attackers gain a foothold. It’s a race against time—once a vulnerability is disclosed, threat actors work quickly to exploit it. Your job is to patch it even faster. Continuous monitoring helps you identify which systems are missing critical updates across your entire environment. The longer a known weakness exists in your software or network, the higher the risk of a breach. A solid monitoring strategy doesn’t just tell you a patch is available; it helps you prioritize which vulnerabilities pose the most immediate threat to your organization, so you can direct your resources where they matter most.
Every system in your environment should start from a secure, hardened baseline. But over time, manual changes, software updates, and even simple human error can cause systems to “drift” away from that secure state. This configuration drift creates security gaps and can easily lead to compliance violations. It’s crucial to keep a record of when resources are created or changed and to monitor software updates to ensure they complete correctly. An unfinished update can be a major security risk. Continuous monitoring acts as your watchdog, alerting you to unauthorized changes and deviations from your baseline so you can correct them before they become a serious problem.
You can’t protect what you don’t know you have. A complete and accurate asset inventory is the foundation of any good security program. But in today’s complex IT environments, new devices and applications can appear without the security team’s knowledge—a phenomenon known as shadow IT. Continuous monitoring helps you maintain a real-time view of your entire attack surface, automatically discovering new assets as they connect to the network. It also allows you to track who is using your applications and making changes to resources. By keeping a close eye on shifts in user permissions or the creation of new accounts, you can quickly spot unauthorized activity and prevent potential threats.
Your network isn’t the only place threats can hide. Every single endpoint—from servers and laptops to the applications your team uses daily—is a potential entry point for an attack. That’s why continuous monitoring can’t stop at the network perimeter. You need clear visibility into the health and activity of all your devices and software to get a complete picture of your security posture. Extending your monitoring strategy to cover these assets is fundamental to managing your total attack surface and catching threats that might otherwise slip through the cracks. By keeping a close watch on these areas, you can spot the subtle signs of a compromise before it escalates into a major incident. This approach moves you from simply guarding the gates to securing every room in the house, ensuring that even if an attacker gets past one layer of defense, they can’t move around undetected. It’s about understanding the context behind the activity on your endpoints and applications. Is that script running on a server a legitimate admin task or a malicious payload? Is that application slowdown a simple bug or the beginning of a denial-of-service attack? Without this level of detailed monitoring, you’re essentially flying blind to a huge portion of your potential risk.
Think of every device connected to your network as a door into your organization. Your job is to make sure those doors are locked and monitored. Keep an eye on all endpoints, including desktops, laptops, and servers, to catch threats like phishing emails that could infect a device and give an attacker a foothold. This means regularly checking that security software is up-to-date, patches are applied, and configurations haven’t been altered without authorization. Monitoring for unusual processes, network connections, or login activity on these devices can be your first clue that something is wrong. A healthy endpoint is a secure endpoint, and consistent monitoring is the only way to ensure they stay that way.
Your databases often hold your most sensitive information, making them a prime target for attackers. That’s why you need to monitor who accesses what. Keep a close watch on who is using your applications and interacting with your data. You should pay special attention to any changes in user permissions or when new privileged accounts are created, as these are common tactics used by attackers to gain deeper access. Analyzing database queries for unusual patterns—like a user suddenly trying to export an entire customer list or accessing data outside of normal business hours—can help you spot a potential data breach or an insider threat in its earliest stages.
The applications your business relies on are another critical area to watch. Application monitoring involves checking how well your software is working. It looks for things like slow loading times, errors, or when an app stops working, which helps ensure your most important tools run smoothly. From a security perspective, a sudden performance dip could signal a denial-of-service attack or malware consuming system resources. Beyond performance, you should also be logging and analyzing security-specific events within your applications, such as repeated failed login attempts, unusual API calls, or other signs that someone is trying to exploit a vulnerability in your code.
How do you know if a critical system file has been replaced with a malicious one? That’s where file integrity monitoring comes in. This process involves tracking changes to important operating system and application files to detect unauthorized modifications. An alert could indicate a malware infection, like ransomware encrypting your files, or an attacker trying to cover their tracks. This is also tied to your broader vulnerability management efforts. You need to stay updated on problems in your network or software and fix these ‘vulnerabilities’ quickly when they appear. By ensuring the integrity of your files, you create another strong layer of defense against data loss and system compromise.
Your organization’s security perimeter doesn’t end at your own network. Every vendor, partner, and service provider you work with is a potential entry point for an attacker. When you grant a third party access to your systems or data, you’re also inheriting their security risks. That’s why continuous monitoring has to extend beyond your own walls to include your entire digital ecosystem. Ignoring these external connections is like locking your front door but leaving all the windows wide open.
A comprehensive security strategy involves a deep understanding of your total attack surface, which includes the vulnerabilities of your partners. You need to know who has access to what and continuously assess their security posture as if it were your own. This isn’t about a lack of trust; it’s about a commitment to shared security responsibility. By keeping a close watch on your third-party connections, you can identify and address potential threats before they become major incidents that impact your business and your customers.
Onboarding a new vendor usually involves a security questionnaire and a risk assessment. But what happens after the contract is signed? A vendor’s security posture isn’t static; it changes every day with new software, new employees, and new threats. That’s why a one-time check is never enough. You need to continuously monitor your third-party vendors to get a real-time picture of their risk level. This allows you to spot potential issues, like an unpatched system or a data leak, and work with the vendor to fix them before an attacker can exploit them. Think of it as a continuous security conversation that protects both of you throughout your partnership.
Your software supply chain is another critical area that demands constant attention. The code and components from third-party developers that you build into your applications can introduce hidden vulnerabilities. Instead of waiting for an attack to happen, you need to be proactive. This means actively scanning for signs of trouble, like dependencies on outdated libraries or unusual activity in your build pipelines. By continuously monitoring your supply chain, you can catch these issues early. This proactive approach helps you focus on the most significant threats and transforms your vulnerability and threat prioritization from a guessing game into a data-driven strategy.
Moving to the cloud offers incredible benefits, but it also introduces a shared responsibility model for security. While providers like AWS and Azure secure the underlying infrastructure, you are responsible for securing your data, applications, and configurations within the cloud. Misconfigurations are a leading cause of cloud data breaches. Continuous monitoring tools can analyze logs and alert you to known threats and suspicious activity across your cloud resources. Given the massive amount of data this generates, using a unified exposure platform is essential to filter the noise, organize the data, and help your team focus on the alerts that truly matter.
Think of continuous monitoring as your digital security patrol. It’s not just about running a scan once a quarter to check a box; it’s about having a constant, vigilant presence across your entire network. This ongoing process automatically checks your security posture, looking for weak spots, misconfigurations, and active threats in real time. By keeping a steady watch, you can move from simply reacting to breaches to proactively stopping them in their tracks. This approach is your best defense against the kinds of sophisticated threats that are designed to slip past periodic checks, including stealthy malware, malicious insiders, and brand-new exploits.
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are designed for stealth. Attackers get into your network and quietly move around for weeks or months, gathering data before striking. A one-off vulnerability scan will almost certainly miss this kind of low-and-slow activity. Continuous monitoring, on the other hand, is built to spot it. By constantly analyzing network traffic, log data, and endpoint behavior, it can detect the subtle anomalies that signal an APT, like unusual data transfers to an external server or lateral movement between systems. This is how you catch attackers before they achieve their goals, using up-to-date information from sources like threat advisories to inform your monitoring strategy.
Not all threats come from the outside. A disgruntled employee or a compromised user account can cause just as much damage. The key to catching insider threats is understanding what “normal” behavior looks like for your team. Continuous monitoring establishes a baseline for every user and system, and then it flags any strange deviations. For instance, if an accountant suddenly tries to access developer tools or a user’s privileges are escalated without authorization, the system can trigger an immediate alert. This allows you to investigate potential threats based on behavior, giving you a crucial tool to protect your internal attack surface.
Zero-day exploits are particularly dangerous because, by definition, there’s no patch for them and no existing signature to detect them. So how do you find a threat you don’t know exists? You look for the chaos it creates. Instead of searching for a specific piece of malware, continuous monitoring watches for anomalous system behavior—a process spawning an unusual child process, a server making unexpected outbound connections, or strange modifications to critical system files. This focus on behavior helps you find and stop security problems before they escalate. It’s a core part of a modern approach to vulnerability and threat prioritization, helping you focus on the real-world impact of a potential threat.
Having a solid monitoring strategy is one thing, but executing it effectively requires the right technology. The sheer volume of data generated across your network, endpoints, and applications can be overwhelming. Without the right tools, your team will be stuck sifting through endless logs, trying to find a needle in a haystack. The goal isn’t just to collect data; it’s to connect the dots, understand the context, and turn that information into swift, decisive action. A modern security stack helps you do just that, moving you from a state of constant reaction to one of proactive defense.
Think of a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system as your security team’s command center. It pulls in all your security data—logs, alerts, and events from across your entire digital environment—into one central place. This gives you a unified view of what’s happening, making it much easier to spot suspicious activity without jumping between different dashboards. Security orchestration platforms take this a step further by helping you automate response workflows. When a SIEM flags a potential threat, an orchestration tool can automatically initiate predefined actions, like isolating a device, which frees up your team for more complex investigations.
Monitoring tools are great at telling you what is happening, but they don’t always tell you why it matters. That’s where threat intelligence comes in. By enriching your security data with up-to-date information on the latest threats, attacker tactics, and vulnerabilities, you add crucial context that turns a random alert into a clear warning. For example, an alert about an unusual outbound connection becomes much more urgent when threat intelligence identifies the destination IP as a known command-and-control server. The best security platforms integrate threat intelligence directly, helping you automatically prioritize the risks that pose a genuine threat to your organization.
Let’s be realistic—no human team can manually monitor every corner of a modern IT environment 24/7. Automation is the only way to achieve true continuous monitoring. Automated systems can continuously scan your full attack surface, collect data from servers, applications, and network devices, and use AI to analyze it in real time. These systems are designed to spot subtle patterns and anomalies that a human analyst might miss. When a potential threat is found, automation can kick off an immediate response, containing the issue in seconds. This speed is critical for stopping an attack in its tracks and building a proactive security posture.
Detecting a threat is a critical first step, but it’s what you do next that truly defines your security posture. A flood of alerts without a clear plan for action is just noise. The real goal is to turn those signals into swift, decisive responses that contain threats before they can cause significant damage. This is where your monitoring strategy connects directly to your incident response capabilities. A well-thought-out response plan ensures that when a threat is identified, your team knows exactly what to do, who to call, and which steps to take first. It’s about moving from simply seeing a problem to actively solving it, minimizing downtime and protecting your organization’s assets and reputation. This process relies on a combination of smart alerting, strategic automation, and a well-documented plan that everyone on your team understands.
Your monitoring tools are constantly gathering data, but you can’t afford to have your team sifting through thousands of low-level events. The key is to configure real-time alerts that are both timely and meaningful. These alerts should provide enough context to help your team quickly understand the potential impact of an issue. Think less “something weird happened” and more “suspicious outbound traffic detected from a critical server.” Just as important is having a clear escalation procedure. When an alert fires at 2 AM on a Saturday, who gets the notification? What’s the protocol for escalating to the next level if they don’t respond? Documenting these workflows ensures that critical alerts never fall through the cracks and that the right people are engaged immediately.
In a real-time attack, every second counts, and manual responses are often too slow to keep up. This is where automated response and remediation workflows become a game-changer. By setting up predefined actions for specific types of threats, you can contain issues almost instantly. For example, an automated workflow could immediately isolate an endpoint that shows signs of a malware infection or block a suspicious IP address at the firewall. These actions buy your security team valuable time to investigate without the threat spreading. Platforms that offer end-to-end exposure management can help you build these workflows, guiding you from detection and prioritization straight through to remediation.
Your alerts and automated workflows shouldn’t operate in a vacuum. They need to be tightly integrated with your organization’s formal incident response (IR) plan. This plan is the master playbook that outlines roles, responsibilities, and communication protocols for handling a security incident from start to finish. The data from your monitoring tools provides the critical evidence your IR team needs to investigate, understand the scope of an attack, and determine the root cause. For instance, tracking changes in user permissions or resource configurations is vital for forensic analysis. A strong IR plan, fueled by accurate vulnerability and threat prioritization, ensures your technical response is aligned with your broader business and legal obligations.
Shifting to a continuous monitoring model is a game-changer for any security program, but let’s be real—it’s not always a walk in the park. Implementing these systems comes with a few common hurdles. The good news is that with the right strategy and tools, you can clear them easily. Think of these challenges not as roadblocks, but as checkpoints on your path to a more proactive and resilient security posture. Let’s break down the most common issues and talk through some practical ways to handle them.
One of the first things you’ll notice with continuous monitoring is the sheer volume of data it produces. It can feel like you’re trying to drink from a firehose. This data deluge often leads to a high number of false positives, which can cause serious alert fatigue for your team. When your analysts are buried in alerts that lead nowhere, they’re more likely to miss the one that actually matters.
The key is to move beyond simple data collection and focus on intelligent analysis. You need a system that can filter, correlate, and prioritize this information for you. A platform that provides advanced vulnerability and threat prioritization can cut through the noise, using threat intelligence to highlight the exposures that pose a genuine risk to your organization.
The tools used for continuous monitoring are powerful, but they often require specialized skills to operate effectively. Your team might not have the bandwidth or specific expertise to manage a new, complex system, which can limit its value. You can’t just deploy a tool and expect it to run itself; you need people who know how to interpret the data and take meaningful action.
Investing in your team is the best way forward. This means providing ongoing training to keep their skills sharp and up-to-date with the latest technologies and threat landscapes. You can also choose tools that are designed to be more intuitive. A platform that offers a unified view of cyber risks in a single place simplifies the process, empowering your team to act confidently without needing to be an expert in a dozen different siloed solutions.
Getting a new monitoring tool to play nicely with your existing security stack can be a major headache. Incompatibilities can lead to data silos and blind spots, defeating the purpose of a unified monitoring strategy. On top of that, the costs of implementation, licensing, and maintenance can add up quickly, making it tough to get budget approval.
When evaluating solutions, prioritize those built for seamless integration. Look for platforms with robust APIs that can easily connect with the tools you already use. This approach helps create a cohesive view of your total attack surface without a painful rip-and-replace project. While there is an upfront cost, remember to frame it against the potential cost of a breach. The right platform provides a clear return on investment by helping you proactively reduce exposure and prevent expensive security incidents.
How is continuous monitoring different from the vulnerability scans or penetration tests we already do? Think of it this way: your annual penetration test is like a scheduled doctor’s appointment. It gives you a valuable snapshot of your health at that specific moment. Continuous monitoring, on the other hand, is like wearing a fitness tracker that monitors your vitals 24/7. It provides a live, ongoing view of your security posture, catching issues as they appear rather than waiting for a scheduled check-up. Both are important, but continuous monitoring closes the critical gaps between those point-in-time assessments.
My team is already overwhelmed. Won’t this just create more alert noise? That’s a completely valid concern, and it’s a common one. The goal of effective continuous monitoring isn’t to flood your team with more raw data. The right approach uses a platform that intelligently analyzes and prioritizes information. Instead of just collecting logs, it connects the dots, enriches alerts with threat intelligence, and highlights the vulnerabilities that pose a genuine, immediate risk. It’s about turning down the noise so you can hear the signals that truly matter.
We have a small security team. What’s the most important area to start monitoring first? If you have to start somewhere, focus on your most critical assets. Begin by closely monitoring your privileged accounts—the admin accounts that hold the keys to your kingdom. At the same time, keep a close watch on the systems that store your most sensitive data. By starting with your “crown jewels,” you can make the biggest impact on your security posture with the resources you have right now.
Does this mean we have to get rid of our current security tools? Not at all. A strong continuous monitoring strategy doesn’t require you to rip and replace your entire security stack. Instead, it should integrate with the tools you already have. The idea is to use a central platform that can pull in data from your existing firewalls, endpoint protection, and other systems. This creates a single, unified view of your risk without forcing you to abandon your current investments.
What’s the single biggest shift our team will see when we adopt continuous monitoring? The biggest change is a fundamental shift in mindset from reactive to proactive. Your team’s conversations will start to change from “What happened and how do we clean it up?” to “What could happen and how do we prevent it?” Instead of constantly putting out fires, you’ll be able to spot and fix the structural weaknesses that allow those fires to start in the first place. It empowers your team to get ahead of threats, not just respond to them.
