Continuous Assurance
Ensuring continuous protection and proactive vulnerability management across your entire attack surface
Moving your cyber security from a point in time to always on
In the era of Assurance 4.0, organisations need continuous assurance that they are effectively managing the changing risks that their businesses face. We know that you require a cycle of services that continuously affirms the scope of your environment to be tested and to understand your remediation requirements.
Our approach to continuous assurance is designed to enable real-time risk management - which means faster resolution of issues, better risk mitigation and less business disruption. We use a continuous threat exposure management methodology delivered by services in our portal, including attack surface management, scenario testing, red teaming and cloud configurations, to keep you continuously aware of cyber incidents and risks.
Our Continuous Assurance Services
Always on assurance
Always-on monitoring and assessment keep your defences robust and up to date.
Real-time detection
Identify cyber security vulnerabilities as they arise.
Adaptability
Quickly adapt to changes in your environment, ensuring comprehensive cyber security coverage.
Human expertise
Expert testers uncover, check and verify complex cyber security vulnerabilities.
Award-winning expertise
Our cyber security team continues to achieve multiple vendor certifications, highly respected industry accreditations and international accolades, demonstrating the breadth, depth and impact of their services.
Benefits of Continuous Assurance Services
- Proactive security: Stay ahead of potential threats with continuous identification and mitigation of vulnerabilities.
- Constant protection: Always maintain a high level of confidence in your cybersecurity posture with your systems being continuously checked for vulnerabilities.
- Total visibility: Get a complete view of your online attack surface, including shadow IT.
- Faster remediation: Unlimited retesting speeds up your response to vulnerabilities.
- Regulatory compliance: Continuous monitoring and documentation assist in meeting industry regulations and compliance requirements.
- Reduced risk: Be ready for significant vulnerabilities as they arise.
Components of Continuous Assurance
Our Continuous Assurance follows a cyclical approach to cyber security. Each phase informs the next, creating a continuous feedback loop that ensures protection is never out of date.
Attack Surface Management
We constantly identify and monitor your internet-facing assets with our cutting-edge platform. This provides you with continuous monitoring and analysis of your external attack surface, enabling you to identify, manage and mitigate vulnerabilities in real-time.
Continuous Penetration Testing
After identifying your assets, you will need to dive deeper into their cybersecurity posture. This is achieved by completing a full penetration test. We use the same methodology and the same quality as we do for our point-in-time testing. Our expert testers alert you to vulnerabilities as they are identified so that you can start fixing them as soon as possible. Following the initial test, all findings are provided via our MyLRQA portal. From there, you can read and export the full report and request retests.
Targeted Testing
When you release a new feature or make a configuration change, you need to see what impact that has on your cybersecurity posture – waiting until your next scheduled penetration test is a high-risk approach. You just need to inform us what you have changed, and we will test it. In the event of a significant change within a covered asset, you have a predetermined number of targeted tests that can be performed. This allows for top-up testing throughout the lifecycle of an asset, such as when new application functionality is released or when significant infrastructure changes are made. Any vulnerabilities identified during testing will be added and any findings previously discovered relating to that function will be reviewed to see if they are still relevant.
Unlimited Retesting
Your penetration test will almost certainly reveal vulnerabilities that you need to fix. Traditionally, retesting has been a rigid process; attempt to fix all of the vulnerabilities, hope you got them all correctly fixed, schedule a retest and wait for the retest. With our Continuous Assurance service, we retest vulnerabilities one or more at a time, when you are ready, as many times as you want. After the initial penetration testing is performed, you can request a retest against any of the identified vulnerabilities by using the retest button. Once retested, the findings’ remediation status is updated and provided in real-time.
Vulnerability Assessment
It is important to test with breadth as well as depth, on an ongoing basis. We will vulnerability scan in-scope systems. Unlike traditional automated vulnerability scanning, our experts will review the results, remove false positive and low-impact findings and publish the results to you via our portal. By doing this we provide high levels of assurance that all of your internet-facing attack surface is known and from there provide further assurance around its security levels.
Vulnerability Hunting
There are occasions when a significant vulnerability with wide-scale impact is publicly disclosed. An example of this includes the MOVEit vulnerabilities that have affected many organisations. We are always on the lookout for this type of vulnerability, and when a new one is discovered, we immediately search your systems for signs of impact. We vulnerability hunt throughout the life of the contract. This means that when a widespread and critical vulnerability is publicly disclosed, we will immediately verify if you are impacted.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is traditional assurance?
Traditionally, assurance exercises are conducted at a point in time. For example, a penetration test may be conducted annually, as a spot check for vulnerability levels. Findings may then be remediated, root causes identified, and changes made. However, this only provides strong assurance at that point in time and those assurance levels start to reduce as soon as the activity ends.
What is attack surface management?
Attack Surface Management (commonly abbreviated to ASM) is a proactive cyber security strategy focused on identifying, monitoring and reducing the attack surface of an organisation.
What services constitute a continuous assurance program in cyber security?
As a minimum assurance package, we suggest Attack Surface Management and Continuous Penetration Testing create a cycle of ‘always-on’ Continuous Assurance. This ensures you gain assurance against assets both known and unknown, throughout a year.
Why work with us?
Specialist expertise
Our cyber security experts hold multiple vendor certifications and accreditations as well as highly respected industry accreditations from CREST, the PCI SSC, ISC2, BCI, Chartered Institute of IT, and NCSC CHECK.
Industry leadership
We lead and shape industry on advisory boards and councils including the PCI SSC Global Executive Assessor Roundtable and CREST councils in the Americas, Asia, EMEA and the UK. We are certified by a range of governing bodies including the payment card industry and are approved as a Qualified Security Assessor.
Everywhere you are
Operating in over 55 countries, with more than 250 dedicated cyber security specialists and over 300 highly qualified information security auditors across the world, we can provide a local service with a globally consistent dedication to excellence.
Award winners
We have been recognised for the breadth and depth of our services – including the TEISS Award for Best Penetration Testing Service in 2024, Enterprise Threat Detection and Cloud Security awards at the Security Excellence Awards 2024 and the Stratus Award for Best Managed Cloud Security Service.
The world leader in CREST accreditations
We are proud to be the only organisation in the world with a full suite of accreditations from The Council of Registered Ethical Security Testers (CREST).
Our team of consultants have achieved the highest accreditations for Penetration Testing, Red Teaming, Incident Response services and Threat Intelligence. In addition, we were also the first organisation to be CREST accredited for our Security Operation Centre services.
Providing Security Testing to a leading UK financial investment company
This client had previously experienced a high number of vulnerabilities, from which LRQA was able to help. The services implemented provided the client with a proactive and threat-led approach; informed by our offensive and threat intelligence teams to protect against the latest industry threats.
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