Cedric Tan
General Manager (Singapore, Thailand & Indonesia)
A company’s biggest cybersecurity risk is often the one nobody’s looking for.
Not ransomware. Not phishing.
Just… a misconfiguration.
A missing record. A poorly set policy. A small gap that quietly exposes your systems to the internet. No alerts. No errors. But the consequences, when exploited, are anything but quiet.
Before a Breach, There Could Be Just a Misstep
Recently, we ran an external scan for a reputable, decades-old business in the region.
Everything appeared normal on the surface. But the scan revealed:
- Their email domain could be impersonated, allowing anyone to send emails “on their behalf.”
- Their website lacked basic browser protections, increasing the risk of redirection or malicious injection.
- Their DNS records were incomplete, which could allow tampering with how users reach their services.
None of these were flagged internally. Yet all of them are visible to attackers.
This business wasn’t under attack but they were exposed. Quietly. Commonly.
And they’re not alone. In Southeast Asia and Australasia, more than 64% of mid-sized firms show similar gaps. And in most reported breaches involving impersonation or redirection, the root cause is not a hacked system, but a badly configured one.
The Impact Is A Business Disruption
When these gaps are exploited, the result isn’t a tech failure. It is a business incident.
- A customer pays a fake invoice to a criminal’s account.
- A regulator questions your lack of controls after a data exposure.
- A board asks why no one knew these risks existed.
Financial loss is often just the beginning. Reputation, credibility, and operational continuity follow close behind.
According to IBM’s 2023 report, misconfigurations contribute to 11% of breach cases, averaging USD 4.5M in damages per incident.
What Your IT Team Might Be Missing
Your IT team may be doing a great job internally. They patch systems, manage firewalls, deploy antivirus.
But most internal tools weren’t designed to answer one essential question:
“How does our organisation appear from the outside?”
To attackers, customers, insurers, or regulators, your organisation is judged by its visible surface—what’s exposed to the public internet.
Email configurations. DNS records. SSL certificates. Website headers. Cloud-exposed assets.
These can’t be hidden because they are meant to be reachable.
But if they are misconfigured, they also become easy entry points. Attackers don’t need to break in. They just need to observe, scan, and exploit what’s already visible.
That’s where External Attack Surface Management (EASM) comes in.
Think of it as a health check for your digital perimeter, like a scan of everything your organisation needs to expose to the world. It then helps to answer:
- What could be impersonated?
- What’s misconfigured or outdated?
- What’s exposed without proper protection?
EASM doesn’t replace what your IT team already does. It gives them a perspective they can’t get from the inside.
Visibility That Cuts Through Assumptions
At Cybots, we help businesses identify these exposures through an external assessment that combines automated scanning with manual validation—focusing on configuration gaps that matter to your business context.
It’s not a generic vulnerability scan. It’s a visibility exercise.
And it gives both business leaders and IT teams something they rarely have: shared clarity.
We also pair this with an internal Compromise Assessment, giving you a fast, structured way to check if any indicators of breach are already present.
No noise. No disruption. No agents required. Just useful insight you can act on quickly. Enquire here to request an assessment or start a conversation.
Don’t Wait for a Wake-Up Call
If your business:
- Hasn’t validated its email security settings,
- Can’t confirm its website is hardened properly, or
- Has never looked at its posture from the outside in…
Now is the right time to ask the question:
What might we be assuming is secure—just because nothing’s gone wrong yet?
For many companies, that question leads to quick fixes, lower risk, and far fewer surprises.
And in today’s climate, that kind of confidence is worth a lot more than another tool.
