Cyber: Third-party Patching And The Business Footprint We All Share

When security teams talk about attack surface, the conversation usually starts in familiar places. Servers, identity systems, VPN access, cloud workloads, maybe browsers. Those are visible. They show up in diagrams and asset inventories.

What gets less attention are the everyday tools people use to actually get work done.

PDF readers. Compression utilities. Remote access clients. Word processors. Spreadsheet tools. Email clients. Browsers. Screen sharing software. Update managers. The background software that quietly powers normal business activity.

Most organizations do not spend much time debating whether to deploy these. They are simply part of operating in a digital economy. Contracts arrive as PDFs. Finance works in spreadsheets. HR reviews resumes. IT supports users remotely. Executives live in email and browsers. These tools become part of the environment almost by default.

At Action1, where visibility into third-party software exposure across endpoints is a daily focus, these background tools consistently emerge as a defining part of the real-world attack surface.

That commonness is what makes them attractive targets from a threat actor’s perspective.

From the outside, modern enterprises look different. Networks vary. Architectures change. Security stacks evolve. But, inside most environments, the same classes of applications appear again and again, and more often than not, the same software titles dominate the majority of installations.

It is difficult to function in modern business without an email client, document processing software, a browser, and tools for packaging, previewing, and sharing files. Using similar products is less about preference and more about compatibility.

Business depends on exchanging information in formats everyone else can use. Without those standards, we go back to the days of file-format wars, “I cannot open that, we use something else,” and lost time just trying to make data usable. That friction is why the industry standardized, and why the same major names still dominate.

Rather than predicting every custom application an organization might run, they look for overlap. If a vulnerability appears in a widely used PDF engine, spreadsheet parser, email preview component, or remote access utility, the chances it connects with something real are high. The exploit is aimed less at unique architecture and more at familiarity.

Source: BleepingComputer