NordStellar Review 2024 — Is It Right for Your Business?

NordStellar Pricing

NordStellar doesn’t show subscription costs on its website. Instead, you’ll need to contact the provider, and its sales reps will find the best pricing model for you depending on your company’s cybersecurity needs. This is pretty standard with threat exposure management solutions, as other competitors (like Darktrace, Cymulate, and Tenable One) don’t display pricing plans on their sites either.

Like most threat exposure management platforms, NordStellar provides access to a free demo. To get access to the demo, you’ll need to contact NordStellar via a form, and provide your business email, full name, job title, and location. A NordStellar representative will get in touch with you afterward.

NordStellar Features

NordStellar lets you secure company assets and allows your security team to proactively detect potential cyber threats — it also makes it easy for them to take appropriate measures to stop the threats from causing financial and reputational damage to your company.

The platform monitors your brand’s external-facing assets (including IP addresses, domains, and cloud resources), detecting vulnerabilities and assessing risk posture while doing so.

NordStellar also scans the dark web for data associated with your organization and provides your security team with valuable insights about how past vulnerabilities happened. What’s more, it provides access to tools that protect company, partner, and customer accounts against account takeovers and session hijacking.

Below, we’ll take a closer look at the provider’s key features:

Data Breach and Dark Web Monitoring

NordStellar provides real-time dark web monitoring and valuable insights about data breaches. It also sends alerts about potential cyber threats targeting your company — such as data leaks, phishing attacks, and mentions of your brand in cybercriminal communities. This lets your security team proactively detect cyberattacks and vulnerabilities, allowing them to prevent leaks from happening or escalating into major security incidents that put your company’s data and reputation at risk.

In addition to scanning for company data, NordStellar also uses predefined sets of keywords that are related to your brand, partners, and industry when monitoring cybercrime communities. This ensures that NordStellar only flags relevant threats that don’t waste your security team’s time.

NordStellar boasts one of the largest dark web data pools on the market. The provider monitors thousands of cybercriminal communities across the dark web ecosystem, such as dark web forums, dark web search engines, illegal markets, ransomware blogs, hacking manuals, and more. On top of that, it also monitors cybercrime Telegram channels.

This feature also helps your security team improve its cybersecurity strategies. That’s because NordStellar provides valuable insights about past vulnerabilities, including how malicious actors exploited them, when the attack occurred, and why it happened. In addition, the service sends updates about what tactics cybercriminals use to target your business (like phishing, malware distribution, or coordinated attacks, for example).

NordStellar is also planning on implementing personalized alerts in the near future. This would allow you to configure the service to monitor specific brand-related keywords and phrases, and receive alerts when NordStellar detects them on the dark web. In the demo, NordStellar showed us how to set up alerts delivered via Slack, which enabled our IT team to receive real-time alerts without having to leave NordStellar open on their devices.

Overall, we think this feature is excellent for proactive data security. It’s also something you won’t get with many of NordStellars competitors (like Tenable One, Assetnote, or Darktrace). And the few competitors that do have this feature (like Cymulate) only provide limited dark web monitoring since they use small dark web data pools.

>> Read More: What Is the Dark Web?

Account Takeover Prevention

NordStellar protects against account takeover attacks, where malicious actors use various cyberattacks (like credential stuffing or brute-force attacks) to take over corporate, partner, or customer accounts. This protects your company from significant financial losses, reputational damage, and difficulties in complying with data privacy regulations.

The provider’s dark web monitoring feature comes into play here, as it’s used for proactive user scanning. Basically, NordStellar scans for compromised accounts and login credentials on the dark web, and then cross-references your business, partner, and customer accounts with them. It then alerts your security team about potential threats, allowing them to stop unauthorized parties from compromising company and user data.

We also like how NordStellar prevents the use of breached login credentials. It monitors user account registration pages and login and password change forms, and runs checks on them to prevent compromised credentials from being used.

The provider also relies on password fuzzing to prevent users from unknowingly creating vulnerable passwords. NordStellar analyzes passwords that have been previously compromised, and generates variations of those passwords via advanced cracking methods. It then automatically prevents anyone from creating and using such logins.

All in all, NordStellar makes it easy for your security team to enforce security measures that protect company, partner, and user accounts. And since NordStellar prevents the use of breached or vulnerable credentials, it significantly limits the disruptions that could be caused by compromised accounts, ensuring business continuity.

Session Hijacking Prevention

NordStellar uses recaptured stolen data (like session cookies) from the dark web to detect compromised accounts and devices. This stops malicious actors from accessing company resources, such as internal networks and cloud-based platforms. It also protects employees and users from identity theft, prevents account fraud (like unauthorized transactions), and stops unauthorized parties from accessing high-value assets like email addresses, phone numbers, and credit card details.

NordStellar leverages its advanced dark web monitoring to scan cybercrime communities and channels for session cookies associated with your employees and customers. When the provider detects a stolen session cookie, it immediately sends you an alert. And the alerts are actionable since they include valuable insights, such as the source of the session cookie and the device it was compromised on.

We also like how NordStellar can invalidate any active session that uses stolen session cookies. This allows your security team to stop cybercriminals from compromising company or customer data even if they’ve already taken over an employee or customer account.

It’s also great that NordStellar lets your team mark users with compromised devices. If it’s a customer device, you can immediately alert the user about a potential malware threat on their device. And if it’s an employee device, it could highlight a need to strengthen the company’s endpoint security strategy.

Overall, we’re very happy to see this feature. Stolen session cookies are a serious cybersecurity risk, mainly because they could allow malicious actors to bypass authentication methods, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and passkeys.

What We’d Like to See NordStellar Improve

Our main complaint about NordStellar is that it’s missing attack path analysis. This is a cybersecurity feature that allows your security team to detect and map potential routes that cybercriminals could use to compromise your company’s network. Basically, it lets your team see what malicious actors see when they target your company.

Attack path analysis could empower your security team to be even more proactive when it comes to detecting and preventing threats. It could allow them to easily map the attack paths that pose the greatest risk to your company. This way, you would be able to efficiently allocate resources to prevent high-risk attacks.

A lot of NordStellar’s competitors provide access to attack path analysis. Some notable examples include Darktrace, Tenable One, and CrowdStrike — CrowdStrike especially stands out since it provides real-time, dynamic attack path visualization that is continuously updated.

Another minor issue is that there’s no way to bundle NordStellar with NordLayer — you need to get each service separately. NordLayer should actually be used together with NordStellar, as it provides endpoint and network security.

Final Thoughts: Is NordStellar a Good Threat Exposure Management Solution in 2024?

NordStellar is an excellent threat exposure management platform. It provides real-time dark web monitoring (and it scans tons of cybercrime communities and channels), it lets your security team analyze past vulnerabilities and learn how malicious actors target your brand, and it protects against account takeover and session hijacking. Just keep in mind you won’t get access to attack path analysis — if this is a deal-breaker, consider other options like CrowdStrike or Tenable One instead.

For the best results, we recommend using NordStellar together with NordLayer. NordStellar helps your security team stay proactive against cyber threats, whereas NordLayer provides network and endpoint security. Just keep in mind that there’s no way to get a NordStellar and NordLayer bundle, so you need to get both services separately.