Holding a Webinar on the Theme "Ransomware Targeting Externally Exposed IT Assets: How Do Attackers Exploit Vulnerabilities? Points IT Departments Should Understand and Address"

Increasing Ransomware Damage, "Attack Surface" Targeted by Diverse Attacks With the rapid spread of digital technology, many companies and organizations are now deploying various businesses on digital platforms. While the spread of the Internet and cloud services, the increase in IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and the utilization of technologies such as big data and AI (Artificial Intelligence) are progressing, malicious criminals launch cyberattacks targeting their vulnerabilities on a daily basis. Especially recently, the target range for cyberattacks, the so-called "attack surface," is only increasing.

How Do Attackers Exploit Vulnerabilities? Particularly, damage from ransomware attacks has increased rapidly in recent years. According to a survey by the National Police Agency's Cyber Police Bureau, over 80% of infection routes in companies and organizations that suffered ransomware damage were "intrusions from equipment for VPN or Remote Desktop". Many attackers first search for publicly available information or information obtained from IT assets exposed to the outside that can be accessed from the Internet, and consider attack targets and attack methods. IT assets exposed to the outside include websites and servers launched at the initiative of business departments, cloud services used by employees for business purposes, etc., which IT personnel on the management side cannot fully grasp. Unidentified assets are often left in a state of insufficient security measures, and the risk of being targeted as an entry point for cyberattacks is increasing.

How Should Information on Externally Exposed IT Assets Including Subsidiaries and Group Companies Be Grasped? To protect your organization from such cyberattacks, it is important to build a system that identifies externally exposed IT assets and continuously and regularly evaluates "whether weaknesses are exposed." However, in companies with subsidiaries and group companies, there are cases where inventory of externally exposed IT assets has not been completed, or the latest status of a large amount of IT assets cannot be grasped. If company-wide countermeasures cannot be taken after appropriately grasping them, it will eventually lead to a cause that increases the risk of security incidents such as cyberattacks.

Explanation of ASM Introduction Guidance Published by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and Introduction of Easily Introducible ASM Tools Under such circumstances, "ASM (Attack Surface Management)" is attracting attention as a method to protect a company's own IT assets from cyberattacks such as ransomware. There is a growing momentum to introduce ASM as a solution that realizes the grasping and management of the ever-increasing attack surface. In 2023, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry published the "ASM (Attack Surface Management) Introduction Guidance ~Discovering and Managing the Organization's IT Assets Using Information That Can Be Grasped from the Outside~" (ASM Introduction Guidance). The ASM Introduction Guidance summarizes the features and utilization methods of various tools and services related to ASM. In this seminar, in addition to explaining the basic concept, features, points to note, and initiative examples of ASM in the ASM Introduction Guidance, the easy-to-use and affordable price characteristic of domestic products