Modern organizations have sprawling attacks surfaces of known and unknown assets that grow each day. This means understanding and managing your external attack surface is more crucial than ever. But with the vast number of digital assets that organizations need to monitor, accurately identifying every component of your attack surface can seem overwhelming – which is why many turn to External Attack Surface Management (EASM).

One area where EASM can help is domain discovery, where the tool finds all of an organization’s domains and subdomains, plus the assets associated with them.  Domain discovery helps organizations to:

• Analyze and triage their discovered candidate domains
• Discover domains they are likely to own
• Discover domains that might be suspicious

Now, this process can be made even more efficient and precise with the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here’s how the addition of AI into Outpost24’s EASM solution can supercharge your ability to discover both real and lookalike domains.

Augmenting domain discovery with AI

Domain discovery is a critical component of EASM, helping organizations to identify all their associated domains and assess potential vulnerabilities. This process is significantly enhanced by the integration of AI machine-learning algorithms that can automate the scanning of digital assets, swiftly identifying both official and unofficial domains related to an organization. This not only speeds up the discovery process but also increases its accuracy, reducing the likelihood of human error.

Here’s how our AI technology works magic in the domain discovery process:

• Analyzing extensive data points: Our AI tool examines up to 50,000 data points, including SSL certificates, namespace matches, website links and redirects, reverse WHOIS data, and more. This extensive analysis helps in accurately pinpointing domains owned by your organization.
• Continuous monitoring: The AI doesn’t just stop at discovery; it continuously monitors these domains to ensure that any new developments or threats are quickly identified and addressed.
• Identifying and tracking suspicious domains: By detecting domains that closely resemble your own, our AI helps in identifying potential cybersquatting or phishing attempts, enabling proactive measures to reduce the risk of impersonation attacks.

Reducing the risk of lookalike domains

One of the key challenges in EASM is ensuring comprehensive visibility over all domains associated with your organization, including potential ‘lookalike domains’ that cybercriminals often use in phishing campaigns. Hackers craft these deceptive domains by slightly altering the names of well-known websites, making them difficult to distinguish from their legitimate counterparts. For instance, they might subtly replace a letter or add extra characters. These domains are then used to mimic reputable companies, luring unsuspecting users into the fake websites to steal sensitive data like login details or financial information.

The risks associated with lookalike domains are particularly acute in scenarios like business email compromise (BEC), where attackers use detailed social engineering tactics to make their communications appear more credible. By impersonating a familiar entity, they create a sense of urgency, prompting victims to disclose confidential business information or transfer funds. These scams often use information gleaned from social media to enhance their effectiveness.

To combat these threats, awareness and vigilance are key. AI plays a crucial role here, enabling you to automatically detect potential lookalike domains and identify these deceptive tactics before they cause harm.

More advantages of AI-enhanced domain discovery

Before the introduction of AI into EASM, you might find you’re spending considerable time manually tracking and verifying your organization’s domains. This process can be prone to oversights and delays that leave security gaps. For instance, you might only have time to periodically review your domain results, potentially missing out on newly created fraudulent domains which could carry harmful vulnerabilities.

Now, with the integration of AI, you can automate and continuously monitor domain discovery. AI-enhanced EASM tools swiftly identify and flag any anomalies or unauthorized domains. This not only enhances the efficiency of the process but also significantly reduces the risk of cyber threats, ensuring a more proactive approach and reducing security exposure time. Some of the benefits include faster response times, reduced workload for IT staff, and a stronger overall defense against external attacks.

Integrating AI into Outpost24’s domain discovery processes offers significant benefits for our customers:

• AI automation speeds up the domain triage process, allowing your team to focus on more strategic tasks rather than getting bogged down in manual checks.
• The precision of AI (92% accuracy rate) minimizes the risk of missing critical domains or misclassifying them, ensuring a more accurate and reliable monitoring of your digital assets.
• With enhanced detection capabilities, organizations can respond swiftly to potential threats, including lookalike domains to help stay one step ahead of cybercriminals.

How Outpost24’s domain discovery works

Sweepatic, Outpost24’s EASM solution, has a discovery engine that uses various methods to find domain candidates that might be related (or unrelated) to your scope in a good (or bad) way. To get the most value out of your attack surface management process, it’s key to triage all (primary) domain candidates as either:

• Dismiss: The (primary) domain is unrelated and can be forgotten.
• Monitor: The (primary) domain is not an issue at this point, but might become so in the future. We want to be notified when relevant changes happen.
• Add to Scope: The (primary) domain is owned by the organization and must be monitored as such.

The discovery engine takes the list of the already confirmed or added (primary) domains from which it will:

• Discover new (primary) domains using various methods.
• Qualify if the web content or used infrastructure is similar to any of the confirmed domains or other information provided.
• Indicate the probability if the web content or used infrastructure is similar to any of the already confirmed domains or other information provided.
• Offer relevant technical data to assist the Sweepatic Platform user in triaging the (primary) domains.

Experience the difference with AI in EASM

To get a complete overview of your entire attack surface, it’s important to include all your internet-facing assets in your attack surface management. But most companies aren’t aware of all their exposed assets, such as shadow IT. Automated domain discovery helps solve that problem: it can complete your attack surface mapping and start monitoring unknown and unmanaged assets. It can also discover assets that might be created with bad intentions to harm your company and/or brand. This will allow you to act quickly before these assets can be exploited.

Interested to learn how our AI-powered EASM solution can fit in with your organization? Get in touch to arrange a free attack surface analysis.