Get Started with Tenable Exposure Management

Tenable recommends following these steps to get started with Tenable Exposure Management data and functionality.

Configure your "Point Products" to get Data into Tenable Exposure Management

To get data into Tenable Exposure Management, you must first configure and deploy the Tenable Exposure Management "point products". Once these are configured, Tenable Exposure Management can then ingest the data and present it.

For Attack Path data ingestion to function as expected, ensure you have the following:

• A Tenable Vulnerability Management Basic Network Scan with credentials.

• One of the following:

  • A Tenable Vulnerability Management basic scan using the Active Directory Identity scan template. This scan type requires fewer permissions, and provides a basic overview of your active directory entities.

    Note: You can run this scan type on its own, or as part of a Basic Network Scan. In a Basic scan, you must ensure the Collect Identity Data from Active Directory option is enabled in the Discovery section.

  • Tenable Identity Exposure SaaS deployed.

  Note: Because the plugin only supports up to 7,000 identities, the Active Directory Identity scan template is not designed for large environments, but is instead intended to help small customers kick start their use of Tenable Exposure Management. Tenable recommends that larger customers deploy Tenable Identity Exposure.

• Additionally, for best performance, Tenable recommends the following:

  • Have at least 40% of assets scanned via an authenticated scan.

  • Select maximum verbosity in the Basic Network Scan.

  • A default Tenable Web App Scanning scan, including injection plugins. At least 40% of the web applications should be scanned.

  • An AWS connection with a Tenable Cloud Security scan policy including all vulnerabilities and available AWS resources.

  • When using Tenable Identity Exposure, enable privileged analysis. This option highlights key attack vectors used by hackers and gives you a better understanding of your attack surface, including credential auditing and password analysis.

  • A scan frequency of at least once a week.

  • Configure Tenable OT Security.

  • Configure Tenable Attack Surface Management.

License, Access, and Log In

To use Tenable Exposure Management, you purchase licenses for assets: resources identified by — or managed in — your Tenable products. Each product has a different asset type. For more information, see the Tenable One Licensing Quick-Reference Guide.

To acquire a license:

1. Determine the interface that best suits your business objectives. For more information, see Tenable Exposure Management Use Cases.

2. Contact your Tenable representative to purchase the appropriate package.

To access and log in to Tenable Exposure Management:

• Review the Tenable Exposure Management System Requirements.

• Follow the steps to Log in to Tenable Exposure Management.

Configure Tenable Exposure Management for Use

• Familiarize yourself with the Tenable Exposure Management key terms.

• Familiarize yourself with the categories and data metrics within Tenable Exposure Management.

Analyze and Assess

Perform analysis on your data within Tenable Exposure Management:

• Access the Exposure View page, where you can gain critical business context by getting business-aligned cyber exposure score for critical business services, processes and functions, and track delivery against SLAs. Track overall VM risk to understand the risk contribution of assets to your overall Cyber Exposure Score, including by asset class, vendor, or by tags.

  • View and manage cyber exposure cards.

  • View CES and CES trend data for any exposure card.

    Tip: When viewing exposure cards, you can toggle between Score and Score (Beta) to compare the differences in your scoring using old and new Tenable data models. For more information, see View Your CES.

  • View Remediation Service Level Agreement (SLA) data.

  • View Tag Performance data.

• Access the Exposure Signals page, where you can generate exposure signals that use queries to search for asset violations. Simply put, if an asset is impacted by a weakness related to the query, then the asset is considered a violation. Using this, you can gain visibility into your most critical risk scenarios.

  • Find top active threats in your environment with up-to-date feeds from Tenable Research.

  • View, generate, and interact with the data from queries and their impacted asset violations.

  • Create custom exposure signals to view business-specific risks and weaknesses

• Access the Inventory page, where you can enhance asset intelligence by accessing deeper asset insights, including related attack paths, tags, exposure cards, users, relationships, and more. Improve risk scoring by gaining a more complete view of asset exposure, with an asset exposure score that assesses total asset risk and asset criticality.

  • View and interact with the data on the Assets tab:

    • Unify all assets in a single view to simplify analysis, understand relationships, and discover exposures across the attack surface.

    • Familiarize yourself with the Global Asset Search and its objects and properties. Bookmark custom queries for later use.

    • Find devices, user accounts, software, cloud assets, SaaS applications, networks, and their weaknesses.

    • Drill down into the Asset Details page to view asset properties and all associated context views.

  • View and interact with the data on the Weaknesses tab:

    • View key context on vulnerability and misconfiguration weaknesses to make the most impactful remediation decisions.

• Access the Attack Path page, where you can optimize risk prioritization by exposing risky attack paths that traverse the attack surface, including web apps, IT, OT, IoT, identities, ASM, and prevent material impact. Streamline mitigation by identifying choke points to disrupt attack paths with mitigation guidance, and gain deep expertise with AI insights (Not available in FedRAMP environments).

  • View the Dashboard tab for a high-level view of your vulnerable assets such as the number of attack paths leading to these critical assets, the number of open attack techniques and their severity, a matrix to view paths with different source node exposure score and ACR target value combinations, and a list of trending attack paths.

    • Review the Top Attack Path Matrix and click the Top Attack Paths tile to view more information about paths leading to your “Crown Jewels”, or assets with an ACR of 7 or above.

    You can adjust these if needed to ensure you’re viewing the most critical attack path data.

  • On the Top Attack Techniques tab, view all attack techniques that exist in one or more attack paths that lead to one or more critical assets by pairing your data with advanced graph analytics and the MITRE ATT&CK® Framework to create attack techniques, which allow you to understand and act on the unknowns that enable and amplify threat impact on your assets and information.

  • On the Top Attack Paths tab, generate attack path queries to view your assets as part of potential attack paths:

    • Generate an Attack Path with a Built-in Query

    • Generate an Attack Path Query with the Attack Path Query Builder

    • Generate an Asset Query with the Asset Query Builder

    Then, you can view and interact with the Attack Path Query and Asset Query data via the query result list and the interactive graph.

  • Interact with the MITRE ATT&CK Heatmap tab.

• View and interact with the data in the Tagging page:

  • Create and manage tags to highlight or combine different asset classes.

  • View the Tag Details page to gain further insight into the tags associated with your assets.