Why Understanding Asset Relationships Is Key to Effective Risk Prioritization

Cybersecurity Risks Aren’t Isolated

In the traditional approach to vulnerability management, organizations assessed vulnerabilities based on their impact on individual assets. Security professionals analyzed specific systems, devices, or applications in isolation, determining how a vulnerability might affect that asset alone. While this approach might have sufficed in simpler IT environments, it is no longer valid in today’s interconnected digital ecosystem. Today, we have to predict and contain the cascading effects of vulnerabilities as they might propagate from asset to  asset, consider the increasing exposure of systems to the internet, as well as the reliance on third-party integrations, as these have become potential entry points for attackers. 

These factors make risk prioritization a critical yet challenging implementation for many organizations who struggle to adopt it. However, once this approach is adopted across the organizations, it enables security teams to better safeguard their interconnected environments.

Holistic Understanding of Cascading Risk

By understanding the relationships between entities such as users, endpoints, buckets, vulnerabilities, and more, Cyclops Security provides a clearer picture of risk exposure. For example, Cyclops can identify an asset that is missing EDR controls, with a CVSS 6 vulnerability, owned by an admin user who failed a phishing link test, and has access to a bucket containing sensitive data. These factors help us understand that if the asset is compromised, the attacker might also be able to compromise the admin user, and user the compromised user to gain access to sensitive data not only on the compromised asset, but also the bucket that the attacker might be able to access.

This level of insight is essential for accurately assessing the potential cascading risk and the business impact of a security threat.

Asset Relationships Influence Risk Aggregation

Cyclops’s Risk aggregation combines multiple risk factors into a single, comprehensive risk assessment score. One of the important factors we consider is the asset relationships with other assets. Without proper context about the asset relationships, this aggregation can be misleading. 

Here are two examples:

• Asset exposure Mapping: A critical asset with dependency on data that resides on a seemingly less important server with a minor vulnerability, could be directly impacted by an attempt to exploit that minor vulnerability.
• Aggregation of Risk: A compromised endpoint can serve as a gateway to more sensitive systems if lateral movement paths are not considered.

By mapping the potential relationships between assets, Cyclops Security ensures that risk aggregation reflects the actual threat landscape, rather than presenting a fragmented or incomplete picture.

Identifying What Matters Most

While traditional vulnerability management helps us understand the severity of vulnerabilities discovered on different assets, it can’t tell us their potential impact on critical business operations. Cyclops adds this much needed additional context by looking into the relationships between the different assets in your environment:

• Business Impact Awareness: Assets tagged as critical business units are evaluated with higher priority when linked to identified risks.
• Exposure Graph Analysis: Our platform visualizes how assets connect and influence each other, allowing security teams to identify the most impactful vulnerabilities first.
• Contextual Risk Scoring: Risks are scored based on their position within the network and their potential impact on essential systems, not just their CVE severity rating.

Taking all these factors into consideration provides the necessary context to prioritize threats more effectively.

The Benefits of AI-Driven Exposure Graphs

Cyclops Security leverages AI-driven exposure graphs to map and analyze the relationships between all assets within an organization. This provides the following benefits:

• Reduced Alert Fatigue: Cyclops correlates related alerts enabling security professionals to focus on true risk clusters, rather than isolated events. This shortens the time required to shuffle through huge volumes of alerts and security data, and improves the efficiency of security professionals. 
• Faster Incident Investigation and Triage: Enhanced visibility into asset relationships helps security teams quickly identify root causes and understand their cascading effects. With Cyclops’s actionable insights the team can quickly define and execute the best mitigation strategies.
• Improved Security Posture: By understanding how assets are connected and their dependencies, Cyclops helps you proactively address systemic risks rather than reacting to individual vulnerabilities.

Strengthen Your Security Posture

In a world where digital ecosystems grow more complex by the day, understanding the relationships between assets is no longer optional — it's essential. Cyclops security enables organizations to adopt a risk prioritization approach that considers not only direct vulnerabilities but also the wider context of the systems they impact. With Cyclops’s contextual risk assessment organizations can achieve more accurate risk aggregation, smarter prioritization, and ultimately, a stronger security posture.