Finding Unknown and Unmanaged Devices
The Problem
Most organizations have no idea how many devices are actually on their network. Employees connect personal laptops, contractors bring their own hardware, and IoT devices get installed by facilities teams without a single IT ticket being raised. Every one of those devices is a potential entry point that no one is watching.
The problem extends well past physical hardware. Employees install browser extensions, desktop tools, and SaaS applications that IT never reviewed or approved. These shadow IT assets often have direct access to corporate data and the internet, yet they sit completely outside the asset inventory. A team using an unofficial file-sharing tool, or a developer running an unapproved cloud
command-line tool on their laptop creates the same kind of blind spot as an unmanaged device on the network.
The attack surface keeps growing on both the hardware and software fronts, and the inventory never catches up. Security teams end up defending a network that looks nothing like the one they think they have.
The Use Case
Picture a company with offices in three cities. The IT team has solid coverage of managed endpoints but no visibility into the smart TVs in conference rooms, the cameras in the parking garage, or the HVAC system a third-party vendor accesses remotely. None of those are in the asset inventory. None have been assessed for vulnerabilities.
On top of that, a few employees in the marketing team have started using a personal cloud storage app to share campaign files, and a developer on the product team installed a database client that connects straight to a production server. Neither tool underwent a security review.
Any one of these, the camera, the HVAC link, the storage app, or the database client, could be the way in. The security team does not need a longer list of tools. They need a way to continuously find every connected device and application, understand the risk each one carries, and act on that information fast.
How It’s Generally Solved
Most security teams rely on a combination of the following methods to keep track of what is on their network today.
• Scheduled network scans that sweep the environment at set intervals, typically daily or weekly, to build a list of connected devices.
• Passive traffic monitoring that watches network activity and flags devices based on the traffic they generate.
• Agent based endpoint tools that report in from any device where an agent has been installed.
• Manual inventories and spreadsheets maintained by IT and security staff, updated whenever someone remembers to do it.
Each of these methods has a meaningful limitation.
• Scans are point in time, so anything that connects between runs is invisible until the next scan.
• Passive monitoring only picks up devices that are actively talking on the network, so a device sitting quietly goes unflagged until something goes wrong.
• Agent based tools cannot reach IoT hardware, unmanaged endpoints, or shadow IT applications by definition, since none of these will ever have an agent installed.
• Manual records are typically 40 to 60 percent inaccurate within three months of creation, since they depend on people remembering to update them.
The result is a fragmented picture that leaves security teams guessing about a significant portion of their actual attack surface.
How Saner solves it
Saner CVEM is SecPod's continuous vulnerability and exposure management platform, built to give security teams complete, real-time visibility into every device and application on their network and to turn that visibility into action.
Here is how it works in practice.
1. Continuous, agentless discovery
Saner CVEM deploys a lightweight network scanner into the environment that runs continuously rather than on a fixed schedule. It combines active probing, using protocols such as ARP, SNMP, and ICMP, with passive listening to fingerprint devices the moment they connect. No software needs to be installed on the device itself, so IoT hardware, contractor laptops, network appliances, and shadow IT applications are all picked up without waiting for the next scan window.
2. Automatic classification
Each discovered device and application is automatically classified by type, operating system where detectable, and observed network behavior. The team always knows what they are looking at, whether it is a managed laptop, an unmanaged IoT device, or an unsanctioned application running on a known endpoint.
3. Risk based context for every finding
Vulnerabilities are assessed in context rather than in isolation. A printer with no internet facing exposure gets a different risk score than a router with a known exploitable flaw sitting at the network edge, so teams can focus on what actually matters first.
4. A continuously updated inventory
The asset inventory updates continuously as devices and applications join, leave, or change on the network. The team is always working from an accurate, current picture of the environment rather than a snapshot that aged out weeks ago.
5. Audit ready by default
Compliance requirements that demand demonstrable asset visibility are covered as a byproduct of this continuous discovery, without any last minute scrambling before an audit.
With Saner CVEM in place, organizations stop managing the network they assumed they had and start managing the one they actually have.