Large corporations are complex and can have hundreds or even thousands of legal entities globally. Many of these entities are unknown to the security team, creating the potential for serious risk.
Global enterprises are complicated organisms. They don’t just operate across markets, time zones, and product lines, they also sprawl across hundreds of legal entities worldwide. Many of these are intentional and well-documented. Others, however, may slip through the cracks. These “shadow legal entities” can create hidden risks for finance, compliance, and, increasingly, cybersecurity.
While most security leaders are familiar with “shadow IT”, unmanaged or forgotten infrastructure that leaves an organization exposed, the concept of shadow legal entities is less widely discussed. Yet, the two are often connected. Unless enterprises tackle both, they risk overlooking exposures that adversaries can exploit. After all, cyber threat actors can target any subsidiary, whether or not the corporate security team knows about it.
The Complex Web of Subsidiaries
Large organizations accumulate subsidiaries for many reasons. Some are formed deliberately to streamline hiring in new regions, manage local tax obligations, or simplify procurement. Others appear as byproducts of mergers and acquisitions. When one enterprise acquires another, it doesn’t just inherit people, products, and processes, it also inherits that company’s entire global network of subsidiaries, affiliates, and holding companies.
The result is a vast, intricate corporate structure that even senior leadership may not fully understand. To cite one specific example, SixMap recently mapped a large conglomerate in the biomedical and life sciences space. The corporate website has fewer than two dozen businesses listed. However, when we mapped out the organization, we found more than 900 entities globally. This disparity is not uncommon.
Unless each entity is carefully tracked and documented, businesses can lose sight of parts of their own organization. That’s where shadow legal entities come into play: legitimate companies that are technically part of the enterprise, but which are invisible to the teams tasked with oversight and protection.
Risks of the Unknown
Unacknowledged legal entities aren’t just a corporate governance concern, they’re a multi-disciplinary business risk.
- Regulatory compliance: A company may unknowingly fail to comply with local labor, tax, or data privacy laws simply because the compliance team is unaware an entity exists in a particular jurisdiction.
- Financial exposure: Shadow subsidiaries may open bank accounts, sign contracts, or generate liabilities without being visible to finance teams.
- Human Resources challenges: Employees hired under a shadow entity might not receive consistent benefits or protections.
- Cybersecurity blind spots: Perhaps most critically, a corporate security team, often centrally managed under a Group CISO, cannot defend what it doesn’t know exists. Servers, applications, and digital assets tied to undocumented subsidiaries can remain unmonitored and unprotected.
In short, shadow legal entities create risk silos that affect nearly every major function of the business.
Shadow Legal Entities as a Driver of Shadow IT
Shadow IT is a well-known challenge. Unapproved cloud workloads, forgotten servers, and misconfigured systems all expand the attack surface. Often, these exposures are created by employees bypassing official channels or by simple oversight.
But shadow legal entities are another major driver. If the organization itself doesn’t know a subsidiary exists, then any IT infrastructure linked to that entity is likely to fall outside central visibility. The result: unknown networks, domains, and applications tied to the business but absent from the SOC’s monitoring.
This overlap shows why shadow legal entities aren’t a problem that can be dismissed as “someone else’s responsibility.” Legal, finance, and compliance teams may not have the expertise or mandate to surface every digital risk associated with these entities. But security teams also cannot fully carry out their mandate without visibility into the entire corporate structure.
Why Traditional Security Approaches Fall Short
Most exposure management practices begin with network discovery—scanning the internet for open ports, mapping IP addresses, or identifying unmonitored cloud workloads. While essential, these methods assume that the scope of the organization is already well understood.
When shadow legal entities exist, the starting point itself is flawed. If the enterprise doesn’t know all of its subsidiaries, it cannot reasonably expect to discover all of its assets. This creates a blind spot that adversaries can exploit long before the security team realizes something is amiss.
SixMap’s Approach: Mapping from the Top Down
Addressing this issue requires flipping the script. Instead of starting with digital infrastructure, start with the organization itself.
SixMap’s exposure management platform begins by uncovering and documenting the full corporate hierarchy—every subsidiary, holding company, and legal entity tied to the enterprise. Each of these entities then becomes a seed for network discovery. Assets discovered on the internet are automatically categorized according to the legal entity they belong to, creating structured, manageable data.
This legal-first approach has several benefits:
- Comprehensive visibility: No entity, however obscure, is left unaccounted for.
- Segmentation and access control: Group CISOs can limit visibility according to the principle of least privilege. A subsidiary SOC team, for example, may only see assets tied to its own infrastructure, while the rest of the data remains inaccessible.
- Streamlined management: With assets neatly organized by legal entity, leadership can manage risk more effectively and allocate resources with clarity.
By connecting legal reality to technical discovery, SixMap closes a gap that has historically been overlooked in cybersecurity.
Don’t Let Subsidiaries Become Blind Spots
Shadow IT has long been recognized as a dangerous blind spot for enterprises. But shadow legal entities are just as significant—and often, they’re the hidden drivers of unmanaged digital risk.
Enterprises that fail to map their corporate structures leave themselves vulnerable not just to compliance missteps, but to attackers who thrive in the gaps of organizational awareness. A truly resilient security strategy must start with knowing the business itself, in all of its global complexity.
SixMap makes that possible. By uncovering hidden subsidiaries and linking them directly to their digital assets, SixMap empowers organizations to see—and secure—their true attack surface.
Learn more about how SixMap can help your organization uncover hidden risks and build a stronger exposure management strategy.
