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Cyber hygiene sounds simple. Patch your systems, remove old accounts, update your software. But for large organizations, this gets messy fast. Systems number in the thousands. Teams are scattered. Some machines haven’t been rebooted in months.
Automation can help. But not everything should be automated, and not every automation pays off. For CISOs, the real question isn’t “can we automate it?” It’s “should we?”
Here’s what’s worth automating in cyber hygiene today, and where to draw the line.
Start with what you can see
Before you automate anything, make sure you can see what’s going on. Many hygiene failures stem from poor visibility. You can’t patch a system if you don’t know it exists. You can’t rotate a password on an account you didn’t know was active.
Asset discovery should be the first thing you automate. Good asset inventories now include cloud instances, employee laptops, mobile devices, virtual machines, shadow IT, and more.
Exposure management tools can automate key aspects of your cyber hygiene program, such as verifying MFA is enabled, flagging outdated software, and detecting weak passwords.
Many CISOs think of exposure management tools as just another form of continuous vulnerability scanning, but that perspective misses a critical point. According to Chris Poulin, Director of Customer Advocacy and Principal Architect at Bitsight, these tools provide something fundamentally different: “They offer an essential external perspective—they have no knowledge of what the organization thinks it owns.”
That outsider mindset is what makes exposure management so powerful. Unlike internal tools that operate with assumptions about existing asset inventories, exposure management starts with a blank slate. “With no preconceived notions, exposure management tools take a comprehensive approach to discovering assets,” Poulin explains. “They use diverse sources—internet registries like ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC, and AFRINIC; domain registrars; DNS records; BGP announcements; and certificate metadata like Subject and Alternate Names—to expose blind spots or overlooked assets.”
Poulin explains these assets include:
- Shadow IT. Any shadow assets that leave a digital footprint (i.e., a DNS record, registrar, registry artifact, etc.).
- Dangling DNS records. Attackers can exploit outdated DNS records that aren’t appropriately retired.
- Cloud usage. Exposure management helps identify where your concentration of assets may pose a risk, either through a single point of failure or the overuse of a cloud provider with weaker security controls than others.
- Domain squatting and parking. Organizations often register domains for future use or to prevent domain lookalike misuse (aka domain squatting), and leave them parked at a registrar. Registrars sell advertising space on these parked domains, but often don’t vet the advertisers—leaving an unintended watering hole for attackers.
- M&A oversights. When a company acquires another or divests a portion of the business, it should include registry ownership. Exposure management helps keep the public databases clean and accurate.
Patching: Yes, but watch for complexity
Even though organizations automate patch deployment, that doesn’t always mean patches are applied correctly. Exceptions pile up, some business units delay reboots, legacy systems require testing cycles that last weeks.
If you automate patching, build in fallback mechanisms. That means:
- Clear alerts for failed deployments
- Rollback capabilities if patches break applications
- Policy controls that escalate based on risk (e.g., zero-days get priority)
Also, align patching cadence with business schedules. Auto-patching that causes downtime during peak hours is a quick way to lose support from business units.
Make sure automated patching is also tied to vulnerability management. Patching without context can waste time. Focus on the most exploitable issues first — and automate triage where possible.
Organizations with high levels of security automation experience significantly lower costs in data breaches compared to those with low or no automation.
Passwords and credentials: Automate rotation, not logic
Credentials are a major weak spot in most organizations. Old service accounts, shared admin credentials, and hardcoded passwords show up in too many breaches.
You should automate rotation for:
- Service account passwords
- Privileged account credentials
- API keys and secrets
Use vaulting tools where possible, but don’t automate access decisions. Humans still need to set policies, especially for high-privilege access. Automating logic like “who gets access to what” can create blind spots or over-permissioned accounts if done poorly.
Also, automate the cleanup. Some organizations leave orphaned credentials after migrations or employee departures. Set rules to expire credentials after a set time or after inactivity.
For CISOs grappling with persistent identity and access management challenges, automating credential rotation and implementing vaulting tools for privileged accounts is becoming non-negotiable. “It helps to neutralize some of the riskiest attack vectors within an organization,” said Dave Lewis, Global Advisory CISO at 1Password. Legacy service accounts and shared administrator logins, once compromised, offer attackers a direct route to critical systems, making them a prime target.
Manual credential rotation, Lewis noted, is “often somewhat sporadic at best, error-prone, and difficult to audit,” leaving security teams with operational blind spots. Automating the process ensures consistent policy adherence and sharply reduces the exposure window when credentials inevitably leak. It also empowers teams to respond to suspected breaches by rotating credentials on demand—without operational disruption.
Just as important, vaulting tools provide a critical second layer of protection. “It prevents password reuse, hardcoding, and unauthorized sharing by centralizing control, enforcing strict access limits, and maintaining detailed audit logs of credential usage,” said Lewis. Real-world breaches frequently exploit unmanaged credentials embedded in scripts and configuration files—vulnerabilities that vaulting solutions can virtually eliminate.
Ultimately, Lewis emphasized, combining automation with vaulting doesn’t just strengthen defenses, it gives security teams room to breathe. “It helps to free up security teams to focus more of their time on managing threat detection and mitigating risks through proactive security efforts,” he said. “For CISOs, prioritizing credential automation isn’t simply good hygiene; it’s an essential defensive strategy.”
Account lifecycle
Employee onboarding and offboarding are high-risk moments. If someone leaves and still has access to systems, that’s a gap. Automate provisioning and deprovisioning through identity providers and HR system integrations. This ensures access follows job roles, and ends when it should.
Automating regular tasks ensures they are done in a timely manner and frees up security personnel to attend to more involved issues.
Automation helps here, but again, humans need to set the logic. Make sure access is tied to current roles, not just past templates.
Don’t automate policy exceptions
Every organization has edge cases. Sometimes, a system can’t be patched right away. Or a user needs temporary admin access. These situations require judgment.
If you automate exception handling, you risk permanent carve-outs. That’s a hygiene failure waiting to happen. Instead, use automation to flag exceptions, and require a human to approve or renew them on a regular basis.
Think of it like a quarantine process. Automation helps detect and isolate, but humans make the final call.
Alerts and reporting
Cyber hygiene data is noisy. An automated system might tell you 10,000 endpoints are missing a patch. That’s not helpful unless it’s sorted by severity, exploitability, and business impact.
Use automation to:
- Prioritize alerts based on risk
- Route tickets to the right teams
- Generate reports by business unit
But avoid dashboards that just show hygiene scores with no context. Good reporting tells a story: what’s improving, what’s at risk, and where to focus next.
According to Michael Lyborg, CISO of Swimlane, aligning with foundational frameworks such as NIST CSF, ISO/IEC 27001/2, or NIST 800-53 is a crucial first step. “A holistic, framework-driven approach allows teams to prioritize risks, streamline audit readiness, conduct gap analysis, and improve situational awareness through continuous monitoring,” Lyborg said.
But compliance alone isn’t enough. Alert prioritization remains a persistent challenge for security operations teams drowning in noise. Lyborg recommends starting with automation to triage alerts based on severity, frequency, and business impact. “Enriching alerts with contextual data and using AI for decision support helps teams zero in on what matters most,” Lyborg noted. “For repetitive, low-risk alerts, implement automated responses to reduce manual workloads.”
The same automation mindset should extend to cyber hygiene. “Focus on automating patch management, vulnerability scanning, user account governance, and log analysis,” Lyborg advised. These foundational tasks, when automated, allow security teams to focus their efforts on higher-value strategic initiatives.
Automation also transforms the reporting process—often seen as a time sink—into a valuable intelligence tool. “Automatically generated vulnerability scans, patch compliance, user access reviews, and incident response documentation offer actionable insights,” said Lyborg. “Visualizations, customization, and integration with security tools enhance comprehension and utility.”
Ultimately, the goal is to boost efficiency and enable a more proactive security posture. “By combining standardized frameworks with intelligent automation, organizations can strengthen their security posture and cyber hygiene, reduce operational strain, and make smarter, data-driven decisions to mitigate threats,” Lyborg concluded.
Start small, measure everything
Automation in cyber hygiene isn’t about removing humans. It’s about helping them focus where it counts. For large enterprises, that means scaling the basics without losing oversight.
The best automation starts with three questions:
1. Is this hygiene task consistent and repeatable?
2. Is it prone to human error?
3. Is the risk of automation failure lower than the risk of doing it manually?
Start small, measure everything, and don’t set it and forget it. Hygiene is never done, but smart automation can keep it from falling apart.
