Unified Exposure Management Platforms: A Waste of Time (Probably)

Right, so some “experts” are flapping their gums about Unified Exposure Management platforms. Basically, it’s another attempt to solve problems people *created* by having a complete clusterfuck of assets scattered everywhere. Apparently, companies can’t keep track of what servers they have running, what software is installed, and who the hell has access to what. Shocking.

These UEM things try to automatically discover all this crap – internal & external facing stuff – then assess risk based on vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. They’re supposed to prioritize remediation, which means *finally* patching that ancient Apache server you forgot about in the basement. They also want to monitor for shadow IT, because apparently trusting your employees is a bad idea now? Who knew.

The article drones on about how this is “preemptive defense.” Look, nothing’s truly preemptive. It’s reactive with extra steps. You *still* have to fix the problems after it tells you they exist. And of course, there are a million vendors all promising the same thing – visibility and control. Expect integration headaches, false positives galore, and a hefty price tag for something your overworked sysadmin could probably do (slowly) with enough scripting and caffeine.

They mention things like attack path mapping which is just fancy talk for “finding ways hackers can get in.” Groundbreaking. They also say it helps with compliance… because *that’s* what we all need, more pointless paperwork. Honestly, if you’re relying on a platform to tell you if you’re compliant, you’ve already lost.

Bottom line? It’s another security buzzword designed to separate fools from their money. Don’t fall for it unless you genuinely have zero clue what’s running in your environment. And if that’s the case… well, good luck. You’ll need it.

Source: BleepingComputer – Unified Exposure Management Platforms

Speaking of exposure, I once had to deal with a company that left their AWS S3 bucket completely open. Anyone could download terabytes of customer data. When I pointed it out, the CTO said “Oh, we knew about that, we were using it for testing.” Testing?! You’re testing public data leaks now? Some people just *want* to get hacked, honestly. It saves me the effort.

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