Maintaining a robust security posture is paramount in today’s ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape — and effective security controls management is a critical component of this effort.    

When it comes to broader attack surface management, security controls validation ensures the effectiveness and reliability of security measures. By extension, it supports and enhances larger risk mitigation initiatives, compliance, incident response, visibility and accountability. 

Systemic and structured implementation, monitoring and continuous improvement are all fundamental to ensuring control efficacy. In theory, security controls validation helps security practitioners: 

1. Get enhanced visibility — Providing a clear overview of all security controls within your organization, helping you understand their operational status and compliance levels. 
2. Practice proactive threat mitigation — By monitoring and ensuring up-to-date versions of security controls, you stay ahead of emerging threats. 
3. Ensure operational efficiency — Identifying and resolving issues with security control deployment and removal, reducing the risk of security gaps. 
4. Support policy enforcement — Ensuring that security controls are running only where they are supposed to, according to your defined policies.
   

Yet for most teams, achieving effective security controls validation is complicated by factors like increasing vulnerability volumes, untimely threat intelligence and telemetry overload.  

Enhancing security controls validation with Adaptive Exposure Management 

Optimized security controls validation ensures you and your team have clear visibility and information that’s relevant to your organization’s unique business context and environment. 

Adaptive Exposure Management (AEM) from Morphisec offers multi-layered exposure management with vulnerability prioritization, automatic assessment of your organization's security controls, high-risk software identification, actionable insights and the ability to address security misconfigurations. Through its security controls validation dashboard, you and your team can better identify and address potential security issues swiftly and efficiently.  

Let's review some popular use cases to explore how AEM works and why it’s a game-changer for your security operations. 

Use Case: Operational Compliance 

• Scenario: You need to verify that your antivirus software is not just installed but actively running across all your endpoints. 
• Solution: AEM from Morphisec checks the actual runtime status of security controls, ensuring they are operational on specified hosts. This verification helps you ensure that your defenses are actively protecting your network, not just superficially present. 
  

Use Case: Version Compliance 

• Scenario: You need to ensure all security controls are up-to-date based on the latest versions available in your environment, helping you identify missed upgrades. 
• Solution: Morphisec monitors the versions of your security controls and compares them to the latest versions available in your environment. This approach helps you identify any hosts running outdated versions, ensuring your environment remains protected against the latest threats. 

Use Case: Unmanaged Controls 

• Scenario: Unauthorized or outdated security controls running on your network can pose significant security risks, including licensing and operational issues. Many times, competing security tools tend to interfere with each other. For instance, if you replaced one endpoint protection vendor with another, but the old one still exists on a host, it’s very likely to cause the new one not to function correctly. 
• Solution: AEM from Morphisec detects security controls running on hosts where they are not supposed to be, according to your policies. This insight enables you to identify and address the missed or failed removal of unsupported software, ensuring compliance with your security policies.  

Modernizing security controls validation 

AEM introduces a dynamic and proactive strategy that evolves traditional approaches. It continuously adjusts to the rapidly changing threat landscape, unlike linear models that rely on static and sporadic assessments. Additionally, AEM offers: 

• Real-Time Operational Compliance — Unlike other solutions that only check for installation presence, Morphisec verifies the actual runtime status of security controls, providing a more accurate assessment of your security posture. 
• Version Monitoring — Proactive version compliance checks ensure that all security controls are current, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities due to outdated software. 
• Unmanaged Controls Detection — By identifying security controls running where they shouldn’t be, Morphisec AEM can help you maintain a cleaner, more secure environment and ensure policy adherence. 
• Comprehensive Overview — With easy-to-navigate tabs for operational compliance, version compliance, and unmanaged controls, Morphisec provides a holistic view of your security controls landscape. 

How Morphisec can help 

Effective security control management is crucial for maintaining a robust security posture. Morphisec AEM can empower you and your team, helping you anticipate changes and vulnerabilities in your organization’s digital infrastructure, versus reacting to them after the fact.  

This adaptational state can help your organization achieve a more robust cybersecurity posture in the face of unpredictable and sophisticated threats — it becomes your team’s single source of truth for exposure and cyber risk discovery, which in turn ensures effective security controls validation.  

Book a demo today to see Morphisec AEM in action and learn how it can support your organization’s security controls validation strategy.