Tenable launches ExposureAI, adds generative AI capabilities across cybersecurity platform

August 10, 2023

Exposure management company Tenable launched Wednesday its ExposureAI, a new set of generative AI capabilities and services available on the Tenable One exposure management platform. The move delivers a large repository of threat, vulnerability, and asset data, enabling ‘unprecedented’ intelligence to identify and mitigate cyber risk.

With ExposureAI, Tenable uses AI (generative artificial intelligence, deep learning, AI, and machine learning) to fuel the company’s exposure management capabilities. Tenable has been using AI and machine learning for years, with capabilities such as Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR), predictive scoring, and other research-driven tools.

Tenable ExposureAI offers three categories of generative AI-based preventive security capabilities: search, explain, and action. These capabilities are foundational to exposure management programs, providing concise guidance, simplifying asset inventory search, and proactively delivering insights for impactful actions.

The search function enables security teams to ask questions using natural language search queries to analyze assets and exposures across their environments, understand relevant contextual information, and prioritize remediation efforts. The explain function provides specific mitigation guidance that leverages Tenable’s unrivaled exposure data to provide security teams with clear visibility and succinct analysis of complex attack paths, specific assets, or security findings.

Lastly, the action function delivers actionable insights and recommended actions based on the highest impact exposures, empowering security teams to proactively address risks and reduce their organization’s overall exposure.

Headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, Tenable has also introduced Tenable Exposure Graph, a scalable data lake powered by Snowflake, that fuels the ExposureAI engine. The unified data platform, representing over 1 trillion unique exposures, IT assets, and security findings (vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and identities) across IT, public cloud, and OT (operational technology) environments, is the largest repository of contextual exposure data in the world and feeds all of Tenable’s Exposure Management products.

“For years, Tenable has used its market-leading vulnerability management data and applied AI techniques to help organizations prioritize vulnerabilities based on true risk to the business. AI is a part of our DNA.” Glen Pendley, chief technology officer at Tenable, said in a media statement. “Now we’re using generative AI to put more power than ever in the hands of security teams to inform their exposure management programs and root out cyber risk wherever it exists.”

Tenable ExposureAI transforms the approach to security by enabling faster analysis, decision-making, and guidance, cutting through complexity to stay ahead of attackers. Leveraging comprehensive data and expertise, Tenable helps teams shift from reactive to proactive, turning all analysts into expert defenders to reduce risk across evolving attack surfaces, irrespective of where the threats may come from.

Prevention has long been a challenge for security teams, Tenable said. “Conducting analysis, interpreting the findings, and identifying what steps to take to remediate and reduce risk has traditionally been a time-consuming process that puts organizational security in reactive mode. Nearly six in 10 (58%) cybersecurity and IT pros say the security team is too busy fighting critical incidents to take a preventive approach to reducing their organization’s exposure.”

Furthermore, 73 percent of cybersecurity and IT pros believe their organization would be more successful at defending against cyberattacks if they could devote more resources to preventive cybersecurity.

Recently, Tenable Research made generative AI-developed research tools available for free to the cybersecurity community. Now Tenable is using generative AI to put more power than ever in the hands of security teams, so they can be more efficient and focus more resources on preventing successful attacks. The insights from Tenable ExposureAI creates make exposure management more accessible and turn all analysts into expert defenders.

Tenable One combines vulnerability management, external attack surface management (EASM), identity security, web application and API scanning, and cloud security data to discover weaknesses before attackers can exploit them. It continuously monitors environments delivering the broadest exposure management coverage available.

ExposureAI is available as a critical component of the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform to power its AI-based capabilities.

Last month, Tenable announced new enhancements to Tenable OT Security, helping customers strengthen the security of their OT environments through the broadest and deepest visibility, granularity, management, and control of IT/OT and IoT assets on the market.