Cybersecurity is reaching an inflection point. Attackers use AI to research vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and run increasingly automated campaigns, compressing the time defenders have to respond. As that window shrinks, defenders need to know which vulnerabilities an attacker can actually reach.
Answering that question is difficult when security tools provide separate views of vulnerabilities, assets, and network controls. Teams fall back on assumptions: that a subnet is isolated, that a vulnerability cannot be reached, or that an attacker on a compromised endpoint cannot reach production. Testing those assumptions requires a complete view of the devices, paths, and controls between an attacker and a critical asset.
Protecting critical assets requires understanding what an attacker can reach. A mathematically accurate digital twin of the network configuration and state computes that reachability, giving security and networking teams a shared model to analyze attack vectors and prioritize which exposures to close first.
Forward Threat Exposure applies this approach end to end across on-premises networks and four public clouds: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud. It computes every attack path to your critical assets, including indirect routes and paths no traffic has been used yet. It accounts for the routing, firewall, and host-based controls along each path, so results reflect the defenses already in place. Collections are read-only and agentless. It injects no packets and runs no exploits in production.
The analysis also shows which vulnerabilities an attacker can reach from the internet or other untrusted network segments. The Forward Risk Score then weighs that reachability against vulnerability severity and the business importance of the affected asset, so a reachable moderate vulnerability can outrank an isolated critical one. When there is not enough time to patch everything, that ordering shows teams where to start.
Reachability also tells teams where to deploy mitigations. For each exposure, Forward Threat Exposure shows the device and rule where the path can be closed, so teams can act before the patch is applied.
Consider one exposure. An attacker enters an exposure point, such as a Wi-Fi network open to guest users, and reaches a CCTV camera running older firmware. The camera stores footage on a NAS server that the firewall rules allow. That same NAS server holds source code backups. Forward Threat Exposure shows each hop: the interface and subnet where the path begins, any NAT boundaries, the firewall rules that let the traffic go through, and the vulnerable systems along the way. In this case, the CCTV camera could lead to the exfiltration of source code. Forward Threat Exposure also identifies the device and rule where the path can be closed, so teams can shut it down now instead of waiting for the patch.
Foward Threat Exposure is built around the work security teams already do. Instead of correlating scanner reports, attack surface tools, and asset spreadsheets by hand, teams can act directly in four scenarios:
Every security team eventually has to answer this question: where is my highest risk of a compromise? Today, that answer still depends on partial views of which assets are exposed from disparate tools and assumptions about what is isolated.
Forward Threat Exposure gives teams a prioritized list of the highest risks, powered by a computed view of every attack path to their critical assets. With that view, they can see the most critical attack vectors, which devices and rules can close them, and what to fix first.
To see how this works in your own environment, talk to an expert today, or visit the Forward Threat Exposure page for more information.
