The Four Stages
1
Discover
The discovery stage assembles a complete inventory of your organization’s external presence using passive OSINT techniques. No probing, no scanning, no contact with your systems.Leverage Cyber enumerates and indexes:
- Domains and subdomains — DNS records, certificate transparency logs, historical zone data, and registered variations of your brand name, including typosquat candidates and lookalike domains registered by third parties.
- IP addresses and hosting infrastructure — IP ranges announced by your ASN, cloud provider mappings, CDN edges, and co-hosted assets that share your infrastructure footprint.
- Cloud services and storage — publicly exposed S3 buckets, Azure Blob containers, Google Cloud Storage buckets, and misconfigured cloud-native services tied to your identity.
- SaaS and shadow IT — third-party platforms where your domain has been used to create accounts, authorize OAuth integrations, or publish data, whether sanctioned by IT or not.
- Employee and executive identities — email addresses, usernames, and professional profiles associated with your organization and discoverable through public sources.
- Corporate relationships — subsidiaries, acquired entities, joint ventures, key vendors, and technology partners whose exposure chain connects back to your organization.
2
Analyze
With the asset graph in place, Leverage Cyber runs every discovered entity through a layered analytical process designed to surface real-world exploitability.
- Identity and credential analysis — employee and executive email addresses are cross-referenced against breach databases, credential stuffing repositories, and paste sites. Each match is flagged with the breach source, compromise date, and credential type.
- Misconfiguration detection — open DNS records (zone transfers, dangling CNAMEs, subdomain takeover candidates), missing or broken email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), exposed administrative interfaces, and publicly readable cloud storage are identified and catalogued.
- Shadow IT mapping — assets discovered during enumeration that do not appear in any known inventory are flagged as shadow IT. This includes expired subdomains still resolving, orphaned development environments, and SaaS accounts linked to your domain by former employees.
- Corporate relationship chain analysis — the exposure profile of your critical vendors and third-party integrations is evaluated. Weaknesses in a supplier’s security posture that create a pathway into your organization are surfaced as third-party risk findings.
3
Prioritize
Raw findings have limited operational value without a way to rank them by business impact. Leverage Cyber’s prioritization stage translates every analyzed finding into financial terms using Annual Loss Expectancy (ALE).
- ALE calculation — each finding is assigned a probability of exploitation and a projected financial impact based on the attack type, your industry, and available breach cost data. ALE = Annualized Rate of Occurrence × Single Loss Expectancy.
- Business-impact ranking — findings are sorted by ALE in descending order. The items at the top of your remediation roadmap are the ones costing your organization the most in expected annual loss, not simply the ones with the highest CVSS score.
- Remediation roadmap generation — each item in the roadmap includes a specific remediation action, the team or role best positioned to own it, an estimated effort level, and the ALE reduction achieved once it is resolved.
- ROI framing — for every action item, the report calculates the return on remediation effort: the cost to fix versus the expected annual loss eliminated. Executives and budget owners can evaluate security spend in the same terms as any other business investment.
4
Monitor
A point-in-time assessment captures your attack surface at a single moment. Continuous monitoring ensures you remain aware as that surface changes.
- 24/7 passive surveillance — Leverage Cyber continuously watches DNS changes, new certificate issuances, fresh breach database releases, newly registered domains matching your brand, and cloud configuration changes affecting your identified assets.
- Real-time alerts — when a new exposure is detected — a credential batch containing your employees’ addresses appears in a breach dump, a new subdomain resolves unexpectedly, a lookalike domain is registered — your team receives an alert with the finding detail, risk context, and recommended action.
- Quarterly full reassessment — every 90 days, Leverage Cyber runs a complete reassessment of your organization from scratch. Quarterly cycles capture the drift caused by new hires and departures, technology changes, acquisitions, and evolving vendor relationships. Your risk profile stays synchronized with your actual business.
- Trend reporting — quarterly reports include a before-and-after comparison of your risk posture, showing ALE reduced through completed remediations and new ALE introduced through surface changes. Leadership sees a clear trajectory over time.
What Makes This Different
Not all security assessments produce the same kind of visibility. The table below compares Leverage Cyber’s approach to the two tools organizations most commonly reach for first.The Attack Chain Leverage Cyber Helps Break
Most successful breaches follow a predictable sequence. Understanding where Leverage Cyber intervenes at each stage explains why external visibility matters more than perimeter defense alone.1
Recon — Attacker Maps Your Footprint
Before any attack begins, the adversary spends days or weeks researching your organization: enumerating subdomains, identifying employee identities, cataloguing your technology stack, and locating exposed services. This stage is entirely passive and invisible to traditional security tools.Where Leverage Cyber intervenes: Leverage Cyber performs this same reconnaissance continuously — so you see what the attacker sees before they act. New exposures that would give an attacker a foothold are surfaced to your team in real time.
2
Identity — Attacker Harvests Credentials
With a target list of employee email addresses, the attacker cross-references breach databases and credential stuffing lists to find valid username/password combinations. Corporate accounts reusing passwords from personal breaches are an especially high-yield target.Where Leverage Cyber intervenes: Credential exposure monitoring identifies your employees’ compromised accounts in breach data immediately upon discovery, giving your team time to force password resets and enable MFA before the attacker tests the credentials.
3
Access — Attacker Gains Initial Entry
The attacker exploits a discovered weakness to establish an initial foothold: a valid credential against a public-facing application, a misconfigured cloud service, a subdomain takeover, or a phishing campaign enabled by weak email authentication.Where Leverage Cyber intervenes: Misconfiguration detection and email security analysis flag the exact conditions that enable these access techniques — dangling subdomains, open storage buckets, absent DMARC policies — and prioritize them by the financial risk they represent.
4
Escalation — Attacker Moves Laterally
Once inside, the attacker escalates privileges, pivots across systems, and establishes persistence. At this stage, the value of external visibility is in having denied the attacker entry in the first place — but third-party relationship mapping also surfaces indirect paths an attacker might use to reach you through a compromised vendor.Where Leverage Cyber intervenes: Third-party risk findings identify vendor relationships where a supplier’s weak security posture creates a viable lateral path into your environment — supply chain risk made visible before it becomes a supply chain incident.
5
Impact — Attacker Achieves Their Objective
The final stage is the breach itself: data exfiltration, ransomware deployment, business email compromise, or financial fraud. At this point, the cost is no longer theoretical.Where Leverage Cyber intervenes: ALE quantification makes the expected cost of reaching this stage concrete and visible before it occurs. Every unresolved finding in your remediation roadmap carries a dollar figure representing the expected annual loss if it is exploited. Remediation becomes a straightforward financial decision.
Leverage Cyber never touches your systems at any stage of the discovery, analysis, monitoring, or reassessment process. Every piece of intelligence is gathered exclusively from publicly accessible sources — DNS infrastructure, certificate transparency logs, breach databases, OSINT repositories, and similar public data. You do not need to grant network access, install agents, share credentials, or make any changes to your environment.