Attack Path Management Impact Report

Welcome to the XM Cyber-attack path management impact report.

We know you are busy and would find it hard to read the report from start to end. To make it easier for you, we created this audio version. I’m Sam and I’ll be your digital host.

This report shares insights from the XM Cyber Research team’s analysis of the Attack Path Management platform from January 1st to December 31st 2021.

The Impact report begins with a close look at the methodology of attack paths and then reveals the impact of attack techniques used to compromise critical assets across organizations, whether hybrid, on-prem or multi-cloud.

Close to two-million entities were analyzed as part of the report. An entity represents an endpoint, file, folder, or cloud resource in the environment the attacker can use to advance in an attack path towards your critical assets.

XM Cyber Research is a top tier research team that eats, sleeps and breathes attack path management.

Analyzing the platform and constantly understanding today’s threat landscape keeps the platform up to date with the latest attack techniques used in the wild as well as the research team’s own personal findings.

Let’s start with a quick Executive Summary.
Here are some key insights and numbers:

• Our first finding is that in less than 4 hops, 94% of critical assets can be compromised from the initial breach point.
  
  
• In addition, 75% of an organizations’ critical assets could have been compromised in their then-current security state.
  
  
• 73% of top attack techniques involve mismanaged or stolen credentials.
  
  
• 95% of users in an organization have long term access keys attached to them which can be exposed creating risk to critical assets.
  
  
• 78% of businesses can potentially be compromised whenever a new Remote Code Execution technique is found.
  
  
• 75% of organizations have an external facing EC2 machine posing risk to critical assets.
  
  
• Lastly, 80% less issues to remediate by knowing where to disrupt attack paths.

This is a general picture, but the details may be even more valuable for you.
Ready to dive deeper?