IONIX announced the launch of its Cloud Exposure Validator to help security teams manage the overwhelming volume of alerts generated by Cloud Security Platforms such as Wiz, Palo Alto Prisma Cloud and others. The Validator analyzes and re-prioritizes alerts from cloud security tools based on actual exploitation and severity, enabling organizations to allocate resources to address the most critical issues first.

CISOs struggle with the expanding use of cloud and the dynamic nature of cloud infrastructure which increase the attack surface. Compounding the problem are the silos created by different teams to address vulnerability management and cloud security, an overwhelming volume of alerts and vulnerabilities, and the lack of any method to prioritize these to a manageable level.

The IONIX Cloud Exposure Validator enables CISOs and their teams to address these challenges by integrating Exposure Management (often referred to as CTEM or Continuous Threat Exposure Management) with cloud security tools. By enriching CSPM findings with exploitable vulnerability and contextual attack surface information, security teams can prioritize alerts that represent actual risk. This often redefines low-risk findings as high or critical, and also validates that high-risk CSPM findings may not have external exposure and can therefore be ignored.

 

 

IONIX early-adopter customers using the Validator have found that most of their Cloud Security findings for internet facing assets can be reprioritized. By integrating with IONIX external exposure data, IONIX delivers a unified security assessment for on-premises and cloud environments, allowing security teams to correlate many security signals coming from multiple tools and teams into one, central source for validating external risk.

The new Cloud Exposure Validator expands on IONIX's Cloud Cross-View product launched earlier this year. Cloud Cross-View uses read-only integration into public cloud environments including AWS, GCP, and Azure to provide a holistic view of all external exposures such as shadow IT, unintentional internet exposures, and digital supply chain risks in cloud assets. Together with the Validator, cloud exposures surfaced by IONIX can be analyzed and validated based on context. Cloud security tools lack insights into asset connections and often fail to distinguish between benign and risky internet exposure. This means cloud security tools are often incorrectly identifying legitimate exposure to the internet as potential threats. Instead, IONIX prioritizes threats based on their practical exploitability and potential impact in the context of the specific environment and attacker behavior.

Key benefits of the IONIX Cloud Exposure Validator include:

Enhanced Prioritization:

• Revised prioritization for each security incident, incorporating IONIX insights
• Focus on the most critical and exploitable vulnerabilities first, optimizing resource allocation across all infrastructure

Contextual Intelligence:

• Gain a holistic external view of your entire IT environment, understanding how broader attack surface factors influence identified vulnerabilities
• Make more informed decisions based on a complete picture of your security posture, regardless of infrastructure type

Operational Efficiency:

• Reduce false positives and noise in security alerts across all systems
• Streamline security operations by focusing on the most impactful issues, whether in cloud, on-premises, or hybrid setups

Unified Visibility:

• Identify risk across domains and attack paths
• Bridge the gap between different security tools and environments
• Get a single, coherent view of exploitable vulnerabilities and risks across your entire attack surface
  

By using Exposure Management to validate traditional Cloud Security Posture Management findings, cloud and vulnerability security teams can effectively transition from identifying theoretical vulnerabilities to addressing imminent threats across their entire infrastructure. This shift not only enhances their overall security posture but also provides tangible value in terms of risk reduction, resource optimization and comprehensive security effectiveness.

"We're bringing CTEM to CNAPP," said Marc Gaffan, CEO of IONIX, referring to Continuous Threat Exposure Management and Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms respectively. "The IONIX Validator brings all of the capabilities of Exposure Management, prioritization, validation, streamlining operational challenges to help separate real cloud threats from noise. Now both cloud and vulnerability management teams can make more informed decisions on how to best use resources to protect assets across the complete attack surface effectively."