Workforce Attack Surface Management (WASM) is the cybersecurity discipline of continuously discovering, analyzing, and mitigating external digital risks arising from an organization's human element.

Unlike traditional External Attack Surface Management (EASM), which focuses on servers, ports, and domains, WASM focuses on people-centric vulnerabilities. It addresses the risks of "Digital Exhaust," including:

  • Shadow Identities: Forgotten accounts on legacy platforms (e.g., MySpace, abandoned blogs).

  • Secondary Digital Artifacts: Traces of employee behavior on third-party sites (e.g., code snippets on GitHub, public Trello boards, or overly revealing LinkedIn posts).

  • Non-Human Identity (NHI) Leaks: API keys and service account credentials exposed by developers in public repositories.

The Core Problem: Threat actors do not just target your infrastructure; they target your workforce’s "OPSEC Fails." WASM operationalizes the detection of these failures before they can be weaponized.

How ThreatNG Powers Workforce Attack Surface Management

ThreatNG transforms the manual, ad-hoc process of "people-centric OSINT" into an automated, enterprise-grade defense system. By treating the workforce as a critical part of the attack surface, ThreatNG provides the necessary visibility to secure it.

1. External Discovery: Mapping the Human Footprint

Effective WASM begins with seeing what the adversary sees. ThreatNG’s External Discovery engine operates without agents or credentials, scanning the internet to build a dynamic inventory of workforce exposure.

  • Shadow IT & Legacy Account Discovery: ThreatNG identifies unauthorized SaaS applications and forgotten legacy platforms associated with corporate email addresses. It detects where employees have "signed up and forgotten," leaving behind dormant accounts that serve as backdoors.

  • Cloud & DevOps Exposure: The solution discovers external cloud environments (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and code repositories that may have been provisioned by employees outside central IT governance.

  • Social Footprint Mapping: By scanning for technology signatures and associated identifiers (such as specific tracking codes or username patterns), ThreatNG maps connections between corporate assets and personal or "grey area" social profiles.

2. External Assessment: Validating the Risk

Discovery is not enough; you must understand the danger of what was found. ThreatNG’s External Assessment capabilities contextualize workforce findings to prioritize remediation.

Detailed Examples of Workforce Assessment:

  • Web Application Hijack Susceptibility (Shadow IT Risk):

    • The Scenario: An employee spins up a marketing microsite or a test server and forgets about it.

    • The ThreatNG Assessment: The system automatically grades this asset (A-F rating). It specifically checks for missing security headers (like Content-Security-Policy or X-Frame-Options). A "Fail" grade here doesn't just mean a server issue; it indicates employee negligence that allows attackers to use the site for phishing or cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks against other employees.

  • Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility (The "Zombie" Asset):

    • The Scenario: A developer points a corporate subdomain (dev-test.company.com) to a third-party service (like Heroku or AWS S3) but then deletes the third-party resource without deleting the DNS record.

    • The ThreatNG Assessment: ThreatNG performs DNS enumeration to find these "dangling" CNAME records. It cross-references the hostname against a vast Vendor List (AWS, Azure, Fastly, etc.) to confirm if the resource is claimable. This assessment prevents attackers from claiming the subdomain and hosting a fake login page to harvest workforce credentials.

3. Investigation Modules: Deep-Dive Analysis

When a potential risk is flagged, ThreatNG’s Investigation Modules allow security teams to pivot from a simple alert to a full forensic picture.

Detailed Examples of Investigation Modules in Action:

  • Domain Intelligence & Whois History:

    • Use Case: Detecting "Executive Doxxing" risks.

    • How it Helps: This module analyzes historical Whois records to see if an executive’s personal home address or phone number was ever used to register a corporate domain years ago. Even if the current record is private, the historical record (the "secondary artifact") remains a vulnerability that ThreatNG uncovers.

  • Archived Web Pages (The "Ghost" Data):

    • Use Case: Recovering deleted sensitive data.

    • How it Helps: Employees often assume that deleting a PDF or a page removes the risk. This module searches cached versions (e.g., Wayback Machine) to find "traces assumed deleted," such as old org charts, employee directories, or sensitive comments left in code, allowing the organization to scrub or mitigate this persistent data.

  • Code Repository Search:

    • Use Case: Stopping "Non-Human Identity" leaks.

    • How it Helps: This module scans public repositories for accidental commits containing API keys, hardcoded passwords, or internal documentation. It identifies when a developer’s "convenience" becomes a critical organizational vulnerability.

4. Continuous Monitoring & Reporting

Workforce risk is dynamic; an employee can expose data at any moment.

  • Continuous Surveillance: ThreatNG moves beyond "point-in-time" audits. It monitors the attack surface 24/7, detecting new exposures (such as a newly public Trello board or a fresh credential leak) in near-real-time.

  • Actionable Reporting: Reports are designed not just for technical teams but for management. They quantify "Workforce Risk" with clear letter grades (A-F), allowing CISOs to demonstrate improvement in employee OPSEC behavior over time.

5. Intelligence Repositories

ThreatNG uses extensive intelligence repositories, databases of known vulnerabilities, compromised credentials, and technology signatures to enhance every finding. This process ensures that whenever a workforce asset is identified, it is promptly checked against known breach data to determine if it has already been compromised.

Cooperation with Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG serves as the "External Scout," gathering intelligence from the public internet. To fully secure the workforce, this intelligence must drive action within internal defense systems. ThreatNG seamlessly complements the following solutions:

1. Identity & Access Management (IAM) and Identity Providers (IdP)

  • The Synergy: When ThreatNG detects compromised credentials or a "High Risk" exposure for a specific employee (e.g., their password hash was found in a third-party breach), it triggers the IdP.

  • Example in Action: ThreatNG detects that an employee’s credentials for a third-party design tool have leaked. It signals the IdP (e.g., Okta or Microsoft Entra ID) to immediately force a password reset or enforce stricter Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) policies for that user, effectively "closing the door" before the attacker can gain access.

2. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) & SOAR

  • The Synergy: ThreatNG provides the external context that internal logs lack.

  • Example in Action: A SIEM sees a login attempt from an unusual location. Without context, it's just noise. However, if ThreatNG has ingested SIEM data indicating that this specific employee recently had their home IP address exposed via a "secondary artifact" or personal blog, the SIEM can correlate these events, elevate the alert priority, and trigger an automated SOAR playbook to lock the account.

3. Human Resources (HR) & Security Awareness Training Platforms

  • The Synergy: ThreatNG identifies who is making mistakes, allowing for targeted rather than generic training.

  • Example in Action: Instead of assigning generic "Social Media Security" training to everyone, ThreatNG identifies the Marketing team members who are consistently using unauthorized, insecure plugins on the corporate blog. This data is fed to the training platform to assign a specific "Plugin Security" module to those users, maximizing training ROI and directly addressing the behavioral root cause.

FAQ: Workforce Attack Surface Management

Q: How does WASM differ from Insider Threat Management? A: Insider Threat Management monitors what employees do inside the network (internal logs). WASM monitors what employees expose outside the network (public internet).

Q: Can ThreatNG find "deleted" employee posts? A: Yes. Through its Archived Web Page investigation capabilities, ThreatNG can retrieve historical snapshots of data that has been removed from the live web but persists in digital archives.

Q: Why is "Shadow IT" considered a workforce risk? A: Shadow IT is the result of employee behavior—bypassing security policies for convenience. ThreatNG identifies these assets (e.g., unauthorized cloud buckets) so IT can bring them under management.