Attack Path Analysis Explained: Why Traditional Security Tools Miss the Forest for the Trees

Your CSPM tool just flagged 1,247 security issues. Your vulnerability scanner found 342 CVEs. Last year's penetration test identified 23 problems.

Which ones can attackers actually exploit to steal your data?

If you're like most Series B-D security teams, you're drowning in alerts with no clear way to prioritize. You're spending time on theoretical risks while real attack paths go unnoticed.

The Problem with Traditional Security Tools

Traditional CSPM tools detect individual misconfigurations: - EC2 instance has public IP (Informational) - Security group allows SSH from 0.0.0.0/0 (Medium) - IAM role has overly permissive policies (Low)

Your Vulnerability Scanner finds 342 CVEs including - 4 criticals in packages that are pinned dependencies that the developers dont have time to fix - 15 high vulnerabilities for which there is no patch available - 2 moderate vulnerabilities CVE-2023-4911 (glibc buffer overflow) + CVE-2023-32629 (GLib path traversal) which can be chained together to gain root access

But they don't show you how these connect into exploitable attack chains.

What Attack Path Analysis Shows

Attack path analysis maps the relationships between your AWS resources and packages to show complete exploitation routes.

Traditional View: 3 separate findings, no clear priority, unclear business impact

Attack Path View: Public EC2 + SSH access + RCE Vulnerability + Instance Profile = Direct path to production database. 1 critical chain with clear remediation priority.

Real-World Example

Here's an actual attack chain we discovered for a Series C company:

Their CSPM tool flagged this as 5 separate "Medium" severity issues. Our analysis showed it was a complete breach scenario requiring immediate attention.

The fix: Restrict the security group to specific IP ranges. One change eliminated the entire attack chain.

Why Graph Technology Matters

Attack paths are literally graphs—resources connected by relationships. Traditional databases struggle with complex multi-hop analysis.

Graph databases excel at questions like: - "Show all paths from the internet to this production database" - "If this EC2 is compromised, what can an attacker reach?" - "Which 3 fixes eliminate 80% of my attack chains?"

Getting Started

Most Series B-D companies have 8-15 critical attack chains they don't know about. The key is finding them before attackers do.

Ready to see your attack chains? Get a free assessment and we'll show you the top 3 exploitable paths to your sensitive data.