At CrowdStrike, we’re on a mission to stop breaches. As adversaries weaponize vulnerabilities with increasing speed, organizations must accelerate their ability to identify security gaps and proactively manage their risk exposure before an adversary breaks in.

We believe identifying and addressing vulnerabilities requires a unified platform approach that brings together real-time security and IT data with threat intelligence, endpoint and extended detection and response (XDR) telemetry, as well as AI-powered exploit prioritization. With these capabilities, organizations can predict attack paths and prioritize risk mitigation actions to stop breaches before they happen.

We’re excited to see the industry validate this approach: CrowdStrike is positioned in the Leaders Category in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Platforms 2023 Vendor Assessment.¹ This marks the first time CrowdStrike has been named a Leader in the vulnerability management space.

CrowdStrike Falcon® Exposure Management reduces intrusion risk by enabling customers to prioritize and proactively remediate vulnerabilities that could lead to a breach. By delivering exposure management as a tightly integrated capability on the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform, organizations can consolidate vulnerability management point products, eliminate additional agents and unify protection against adversary intrusion.

CrowdStrike: An Integrated Platform Approach to Vulnerability Management

As noted in the report, CrowdStrike’s approach to exposure management “fits into the CrowdStrike mission of stopping breaches as a preventative control to help organizations be proactive in managing their risk posture with continuous monitoring.” 

CrowdStrike believes an integrated platform approach to vulnerability management provides customers with the visibility needed to understand where an adversary is likely to attack and the ability to proactively use that information to reduce risk exposure. The unified CrowdStrike Falcon® platform integrates data from CrowdStrike Falcon® Surface external attack surface management, CrowdStrike Falcon® Discover IT hygiene and CrowdStrike Falcon® Spotlight vulnerability management to deliver Falcon Exposure Management and a truly proactive approach to reducing adversary intrusion risk. 

The IDC MarketScape evaluated 16 vendors. CrowdStrike was recognized for strengths and capabilities that include:

Consolidating point products and eliminating agents: The Falcon platform offers unified visibility through a lightweight, single-agent approach. “CrowdStrike has a number of other modules that show exposures related to cloud misconfigurations and identity risks, though it has not yet brought them into its Falcon Exposure Management platform.” 

Delivering deep asset understanding and attacker context: According to the report, “Beyond CVEs, Falcon Spotlight shows zero-day vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, end-of-support software, expired certificates, and identity risks. In the identity area, Falcon Spotlight helps customers by showing where an adversary is likely to target, such as administrative accounts or service accounts, so the security team can proactively reduce privileges.”

The IDC MarketScape report also recognized the benefits of greater automation and AI capabilities, stating “CrowdStrike helps customers take action on vulnerability findings with a script engine that can change firewall rules or policies. With Falcon Fusion, which is free to all customers, customers can automate the ticket creation workflow in ServiceNow and create playbooks. CrowdStrike’s Charlotte AI assistant enables natural language queries around vulnerabilities today.”

Getting Ahead of the Vulnerability Problem with Falcon Exposure Management

For many security teams, merely knowing what they need to protect is a challenge. Developing a holistic understanding of their assets, associated exposures and adversary context requires an integrated approach that traditional vulnerability management solutions lack. Organizations often attempt to understand and defend their growing attack surface with multiple point products, which typically operate in silos and lack meaningful integrations with other tools that provide insight and mitigation capabilities. 

Point products often create visibility gaps that adversaries can exploit. As vulnerabilities proliferate, disparate systems disrupt collaboration and the ability to prioritize mitigation of the most critical vulnerabilities before adversaries strike. The number is growing: The IDC MarketScape states there were “25,000 CVE records published in 2022, with that number likely to be surpassed in 2023.” Solving the vulnerability problem requires a full understanding of an organization’s assets, the risk exposure of those assets and proactive steps required to remove intrusion opportunities. 

CrowdStrike Falcon Exposure Management harnesses the cutting-edge capabilities of the Falcon platform and utilizes the unified and lightweight Falcon agent to enable real-time, maintenance-free vulnerability assessment. It integrates CrowdStrike’s predictive ExPRT.AI prioritization models, trained on world-class threat intelligence and EDR detection data. These features empower security teams to strategically allocate their limited resources and focus on the risk exposures that are most likely to be exploited. 

Falcon Exposure Management offers unparalleled asset discovery and understanding, extensive exposure assessment and consolidated visibility across the entire attack surface. This comprehensive suite of capabilities assists organizations in staying on top of their internal and external asset exposures. Most customers experience a 75% reduction in their external attack surface, mitigating risks and fostering collaboration within the security team. By combining Falcon Exposure Management with CrowdStrike’s security solutions, organizations can safeguard their systems against adversaries and maintain a proactive security posture. 

Bridging the Gap Between Security and IT

CrowdStrike’s leadership in vulnerability management provides a strong foundation to bridge the gap between security and IT. Security teams help protect the infrastructure IT teams build — however, they also rely on IT to carry out security measures such as patching, remediation, hardening, segregation and more. Truly effective security isn’t just about the platform the security team uses, but one that can empower collaboration between IT and security. Traditionally, the two teams have had different toolsets and have lacked a single source of truth, causing issues and eroding trust when problems are “thrown over the wall” between teams.

The Falcon platform has powerful capabilities that IT teams can leverage. The powerful asset management capability driving Falcon Exposure Management is the same asset management capability IT teams covet. It is not just a simple asset inventory — it provides deep discovery, context and visualization that benefit IT teams as well.

CrowdStrike recently announced Falcon for IT, a new IT automation offering designed to bridge the gap between security and IT with elegant end-to-end workflows. With Falcon for IT, teams can use their existing CrowdStrike Falcon agents to search all system-related events and performance data, monitor the state of CrowdStrike-managed endpoints and automate remediation to rapidly fix issues, such as installing patches and changing endpoint policies.     

By bringing the speed of the Falcon platform to IT teams, CrowdStrike unifies proactive and real-time security and brings together security and IT to more effectively achieve the ultimate goal of stopping breaches.

Additional Resources

• Download the IDC MarketScape for Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Platforms 2023 Vendor Assessment excerpt.
• Learn more about Falcon Exposure Management.
• Watch an on-demand demo of CrowdStrike’s pioneering, cloud-delivered Falcon platform in action.
• Experience the power of next-generation cybersecurity with a 15-day free trial of the Falcon platform.

1.  IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Platforms 2023 Vendor Assessment. Doc #US50302323, Nov. 2023